Nov 06 2007
The Nudist in Me
Below is the first post from our first guestblogger on The Nude Life, Nudiarist:
Some days I think that everyone is a nudist at heart. We’re born naked, we bathe naked, we make love naked, but as a society we generally do not socialize naked, except for the lucky few who have managed to come to the realization that clothing is not only unnecessary, but that it serves to imprison the true self.
I’ve always been a nudist but did not realize it until a couple of years ago. When I was a kid I swam naked at the YMCA, went nude in gang showers throughout high school, and went skinny dipping on several occasions as a teenager. I went to professional art school and spent countless hours drawing and painting nude models, and when I got into photography I turned the camera on myself for nude figure studies when none of my friends were up to the challenge. When nobody was around, I sunbathed nude on our private rural property.
All of that changed when I got married and we had a daughter. Societal norms had triumphed over my young Bohemian spirit.
When my daughter entered college a few years ago, I found myself alone most of the time at work in our home office, and I would strip down and work naked as often as possible.
The problem is that I did this in secret. The odd thing about the human mind is that it sometimes does not question certain traditions, customs, or habits which become part of our everyday lives. Although I had been unashamed of being naked as a youth, as a 50 year-old man the practice somehow seemed wrong.
One night I found myself searching for nudist information in the Internet. I was completely overwhelmed by all the people who seemed so excited to tell the world about their “first times” experiencing social nudism. It became clear to me that I wanted to be, even needed to be, part of that world.
When I told my wife, it came pretty much out of the blue, and while she was a little concerned at first, her attitude quickly adjusted to finding it all very funny. She knows me pretty well, having been married to me for 25 years, and once she realized that I was the same person, only now naked, she soon became fully accepting.
It was not a difficult adjustment to go from clothed most of the time to naked most of the time. At first I was very aware of my nakedness, but gradually nude became the norm, and now putting on clothes feels like the unnatural state that it actually is.
The difficult part of the process was finding a local nudist group here in Columbus, Ohio. Several e-mails to a couple of non-landed clubs in the area went unanswered, and I was a little discouraged. It seemed that a married male wanting to practice social nudism in Ohio without a wife in tow was a nearly impossible task.
Eventually I got in touch with one of the groups, which apparently had gone in a sort of hibernation for a couple of years, and went to one of their swims. I was immediately accepted into the group and am now a member.
As for my wife, on the day of the last swim she shaved her legs in case she decided to go with me, although she backed out at the last minute. I’ve never put any pressure on her at all, but I really think that she’s beginning to understand that she’s missing something by staying at home watching TV while I’m out swimming with my nude friends. Maybe next time.
There is something wonderful about being nude in a social setting that defies words. As a blogger, I try and come up with new angles and issues concerning the nude life, but unless you actually go and experience the freedom, you will not know how it really feels.
The nudist in me is finally free.
nudiarist
Diary of a Nudist