So Long

And Thanks for All the Flesh

Photo by Bruno Luz

Do you ever snap into consciousness while driving and realize that you’d lost track of time? That you don’t remember the last two, four, ten miles of freeway? That you’re not sure you’re even going the right direction? That maybe you missed your exit?

That’s how I’ve been feeling about my place in the nudist community.

Growing up, in my childhood church community, they would have called this kind of questioning a “crisis of faith.” They would have called it “doubt.” Though it was not always about faith or about doubting. It was not always about questioning one’s belief in God, or in a god, or in some other higher power, though that could be part of it. Often, a crisis of faith was how the church branded the act of questioning the teachings, strictures, authority, and role of religious institutions and whether they align with one’s path in life and overall worldview. It was part of the damage control, I guess, to treat criticism of the church and reassessment of one’s values as a problem inherent to the questioner and not the institutions. But, for all intents and purposes, that essentially describes what I’m working through right now and the conclusions I’ve come to regarding nudism.

Something—I’m not quite sure what—sparked some reassessment for me, of my values, my worldview, who I am as a person, and who I want to be as a person. Maybe it was a weird social interaction I had at a nudist club. Maybe it was one of the handful of major life events I’ve experienced this past year. Maybe it’s connecting the dots on my own broken wiring, realizing how much of that malfunction is tied to choices I’ve made in my own life. Maybe it’s all of those things. But in that assessment, I’ve been examining what impact nudism has had on me truly. Not just in the rose-colored, “everything is wonderful” kind of way that nudists usually do, but in more of an “uh-oh, maybe there’s some baggage to unpack here” kind of way. An “oops, maybe I wasn’t being honest with myself” kind of way. A “who am I even doing this for?” kind of way. All of that led me to the question, “what do I even actually believe in regards to nudity and nudism?”

I asked myself a bunch of questions, many uncomfortable: Am I doing this because it’s fulfilling for me personally, or because it’s comfortable and familiar? Am I here because it’s making me happy, or because I enjoy the validation of others? Am I here because I love this community or because I am desperate for community itself? Am I sticking around because I agree with everything the nudist community stands for, or because I crave this specific kind of deeds-based approval? Is it just that the instant approval I get from talking about nudity, touting nudist mantras, and flashing peen on the internet scratches that itch? Is that any different from the religious upbringing I once knew, from all the Bible verse quoting and righteous signaling and prayer performances that made me feel hollow and unknowable and lonely growing up? How much do I really enjoy nudity? How much do I honestly, actually want to be nude in my everyday life?

Importantly, what are my true, honest, actual beliefs about nudity and sex and the human body absent nudism? Do I even know?

After a lot of thought, I think I can answer most of those questions. I do enjoy being nude, and I enjoy having the option of nude recreation in my life, but I don’t believe that my time spent nude or recreating nude is inherently better or more fulfilling than time spent wearing clothes. They’re just different experiences. Both can be good or bad, both can be fulfilling or draining. I like having those options. I like being nude, but I like the freedom of having options more than I like the freedom of nudity itself. I don’t want to be nude all the time and I don’t believe nudity is superior to wearing clothing. I actually really like wearing my clothes, and it’s weird that I feel like I’m not allowed to express that within the nudist community. I don’t believe that nudity has a magical power to heal someone’s body dysmorphia or insecurity or confidence issues or sexual trauma, but some people might be able to use it as a tool to get there alongside other means… like therapy or counseling or a good wellness retreat. I don’t believe nudity is inherently meaningful, but that we bring to it and draw from it the meaning that we seek, the meaning that we need, and that’s beautiful enough. I think, more than anything, I am fascinated by the way we as humans engage with nudity, the ways we use it to express ideas through art and film and literature, the ways we stress about it, the ways we demonize it sometimes and celebrate it others. In my writing lately, this is what I have spent my time discussing… not whether instances of nudity appropriately evangelize nudism but what our collective views of nudity say about us as a society.

And, yeah, I think that I’ve been enjoying the validation of community, the validation of a few “likes” on social media. I think I’ve resisted exploring the world around me, the communities around me, in favor of the easy option which was seeking and gleaning approval from folks whose only demand of me was being naked, bottling up my own sexual expression, flashing peen from time to time on the internet, and saying nice things about the nudist community. Sure, in a lot of ways, my views on nudity and my appreciation for nude recreation do align with the nudist community. But there’s too much of myself that I have willingly sacrificed in order to fit into a community that I now realize was not entirely healthy for me… was maybe even harmful. Despite my best intentions, I allowed myself to develop a warped sense of the human body. I allowed myself to believe that my own sexuality (by which I mean my enjoyment of sex itself, not the fact that I am gay) was a threat to my ability to be part of the one community I’d chosen to prioritize. My sense of self became tied to shunning parts of myself, parts of my human experience. I developed shame, guilt, and a pattern of secrecy around my body and sex and my appearance and my self-worth that I can trace all the way back to that young naturists forum I was a part of as a teenager, but that have also carried through much of my experience in the nudist community since. It all just snowballed into me feeling hollow, lonely, and detached from myself and my body… the opposite of how I was supposed to feel.

So, if all of this is making me feel so bad, then how did I get here? Why didn’t I stop at any point along this trajectory?

Uh, well, that’s another uncomfortable question, but I’m going to be as vulnerable and as honest as I can. I have been pretty forthcoming about my childhood growing up in an Evangelical church, in an extremely conservative home, attending a private Christian school (which I promise was not as fancy as it sounds… think coordinated, offsite, religious homeschooling). My childhood, all the way up until I was eighteen years old, was stifled with conflicting teachings, dogmatic rules, shame, guilt, secrecy around every little joy or pleasure or sense of personhood. Church trained me to self-police, to hide myself, to pretend to be what others wanted of me at the expense of exploring who I actually was. All in order to feel accepted into the community. In that case, I also didn’t have a choice. I did not choose to be part of a religious community. I did not choose to go to church three or four times a week. I did not choose for my primary source of validation and approval to be a group of people who would never see or approve of me for the whole person I was or would grow to be. But… I got really comfortable with that feeling. I got really comfortable grasping for an approval I could never attain. I got really comfortable seeking the approval of folks who categorically disapproved of people like me who were different, who challenged beliefs, who did not fit. I got really comfortable in strict, oppressive environments with clear rules, clear rights and wrongs, clear paths to gain approval and validation. There was comfort in the chaos, because it was familiar and it was everywhere I turned.

When I came out of the closet at age eighteen, I lost everything I grew up with… my church, yes, but I would have left that anyway. I also lost my community. Even though I sort of patched things up with my family enough to keep in contact, that connection and safety and warmth was lost. I did not have anything or anyone I could really trust in life. I did not have anything stable to lean on. So, I guess in my insecurity, my anxiety, and my need for community, I found myself drifting into the comfort of something familiar. It turns out a perfect replacement for the stifling dogma of a religious community in childhood is the comfortable, familiar dogma of organized nudism in adulthood. It has rules of conduct, clear rights and wrongs, whole behaviors and ways of thinking that are off limits, specialized in-speak to make you feel like part of something, mantras to recite, and an ever-present nudge to make this one thing an all-encompassing part of your life. Because life is better nude!

I don’t mean to denigrate the nudist community, even though I am pretty aware that that’s how all of this is going to come across. Let me reiterate: I do enjoy being naked sometimes. I do enjoy the feeling of the sun on my skin, the breeze and grass and sand and waves on my body. I do believe society has too many hangups about nudity. I do think it can be fun and liberating to do random stuff naked, by yourself or with other people. All of that is true, but none of that means that I must align myself with everything that the organized nudist community stands for or represents. None of that requires nudism.

Ugh. Do you see what I did there? Even as I’m making my case for why I’m walking away from nudism, I am still clamoring for validation on the way out the door and putting effort into reassuring you that I’m still “good,” that I still deserve your approval. I literally cannot help myself.

Look, even though I am making the decision to walk away from this community, I still think all of this is an important part of my own nudist experience and you, dear reader, might find it helpful in your own journey. Something I think everyone, regardless of their belief system or community, should do at some point—or even regularly, honestly—is take a step out of their own context and ponder what their actual beliefs and values are absent the community they belong to that enforces them. What I mean to say is, take away nudism, you nudists, and ask yourself what your views are—or would be—about nudity, sexuality, humanity, equality, and personal freedoms without any of the talking points of the nudist community. Conversely, ask yourself how much of your views and values have been derived from your experience within the nudist community, ask yourself if those views are actually yours, and ask yourself if those core views and beliefs of yours are compatible with what you’ve gleaned. It’s OK if those things do align! It’s great, even. And it’s also OK if they don’t align. If you have an appreciation for nudity, though, let yourself form that appreciation on a personal level… for you. Let yourself have your own perspective that is bigger than nudism or naturism. Let yourself form an identity outside of whatever community or communities you choose. I didn’t. I messed that up, I guess.

What I have realized for myself, however, is that I don’t need nudism or naturism to enjoy nudity. Like the freedom of spirituality without the burden of organized religion, I don’t need to be a nudist or follow the rules of the nudist community in order to spend a lovely afternoon at the nude beach or savor the sun on my skin or celebrate the myriad ways that nudity can be meaningful or powerful or impactful for people. I think, now, that the strictures around nudism were even blocking me from something. I wanted so desperately to feel like a part of something, that I did not stop to realize that it was coming at the cost of a part of myself, and was frankly also coming at the expense of a fuller, healthier, more humane appreciation of nudity, and that was supposed to be the whole reason I was here at all. Since coming to this conclusion, though, that I don’t need nudism or the approval of nudists, I’ve felt… actually… more free than I have in a very long time. Free, because I am choosing to let go of the strictures around how I enjoy and love and celebrate my body. Free, because I am being honest with myself about what I believe, who I am, what I need, and the impact of my choices… including the ones I’m not proud of. Free, because the spectrum of nudity that I am allowed to enjoy and savor has just expanded and I feel myself settling into my body in ways I never have. Ironically, that is the freedom I was always hoping to unlock in nudism. That is the liberation that I kept writing about all this time, that I thought nudism might one day be able to represent. But that doesn’t really matter. I don’t need to convince anybody of anything because I’ve decided I want to move on and close this chapter.

I don’t have it all figured out, but I can recognize that nudity and nudism have occupied an outsized portion of my time and energy compared to their role in my actual life and values. I’ve wrapped too much of myself in one part of my world and presented myself in a way that I don’t think is authentic to who I really am to garner approval.

So, now, who even am I? And where do I go from here?

Who I am is something I’ve been thinking about a lot in this process. I felt really lost, to be honest, as I pondered all of this so I, uh… actually made a list in the notes app of my phone to remind myself of everything I like about me, about what I believe, about who I want be, and what I struggle with. It’s very disorienting, but it was a good exercise. For now, though, I’m carefully and selectively diversifying where I’m spending my time and energy. I am spending more time meeting up with friends, exploring Los Angeles, working out, making plans that don’t involve getting naked at all but that make me feel refreshed and connected with my neighborhood, my city, my people. I’m exploring the parts of myself that I’ve caged in service of being a good nudist.

As for Almostwild, I’ve decided to close up shop. I don’t want to write about nudism anymore because it suddenly feels… inauthentic, maybe even contrary to my beliefs. I was ready to take the whole thing offline... I don’t know, I guess it feels like a disservice to keep all of these writings alive and accessible when I no longer believe in the path they will lead the reader down. But, a friend talked me out of that, and I’ll leave them up… because someone might still find that path valuable for them. I even considered for a moment just not saying anything and simply no longer posting here, without an explanation. I find it kind of cringe-inducing when people announce their departure from whatever place. It always feels like the announcer has overestimated their impact on their audience, like their departure is going to have some immense impact on the world. I’m under no illusions that my impact is so grand, but I also feel like, for those readers who do follow my writings and the path that I have been on over these past six years, they might appreciate the conclusion, or at least the closure. They might have picked up on these threads of discontent and disappointment, on the feelings of hollowness and wishing the nudist community stood for something greater and more liberating than it actually did. They might want to know where it all ended up.

I also could not in good conscience have my final article before I disappeared be a treatise on American Psycho. You might think I went all Patrick Bateman.

Anyway… I’ve turned off paid subscriptions and released all of the paywalled articles on Almostwild. I’ll eventually let the custom domain expire and the blog will revert back to the original Substack domain… so a bunch of URLs will probably be broken starting in early to mid-2025, but the articles will still exist. I won’t be posting any new articles on Almostwild, and I don’t plan on writing about nudism anywhere else. I’ll surely still be getting naked, on my terms, when I want to, for myself. Maybe some day I’ll write again… maybe about the topic I seem to keep gravitating towards: nudity in popular culture and what that tells us about ourselves. Or maybe I’ll write about some of the other things I love. Like politics, or film, or linguistics and etymology, or baking, or LGBTQ issues, or style, or home interiors, or pop culture. The world is my oyster. It always was… I just forgot that, or didn’t realize it until now.

I guess I’ll see where I end up! For now, I just want to say… So long.

Thanks for reading. Thanks for the support and kindness you’ve shown me over the years. Thanks for hearing me out and for understanding.

And thanks for all the flesh.

I’ll see myself out.