When You Become A Nudist…You’ll Never Look Back

Once a Nudist, Always a Nudist!

I want to tell you about the exact moment I understood that I had crossed a line that was not going back across, and I want to tell you about it with the complete honesty that I have maintained throughout every book in this series, which means I am going to tell you that the moment was not dramatic and it was not transcendent and it was not the kind of thing that would make a good movie scene or a powerful Instagram caption or any of the versions of the conversion moment that the nudist community's promotional materials tend to favor.

The moment was a Tuesday afternoon at a resort outside of Seattle when I realized I had been sitting in the sun for three hours talking to a retired schoolteacher from Bellingham about salmon migration patterns and the specific politics of the Pacific Northwest fishing industry and I had not once, in those three hours, thought about being naked. Not once. Not a single background process running on the subject. The body was simply the body, in the sun, present, unremarkable, and my entire available mental bandwidth was occupied by the salmon and the fishing politics and the specific warmth of a conversation with a genuinely interesting person on a genuinely beautiful afternoon.

I drove home afterward in the Volvo with the specific quality of someone who has understood something that they had been working toward for a long time without knowing quite what they were working toward. The understanding was not complicated. It was simply this: I am a nudist. Not I am trying nudism, not I am exploring nudism, not I am interested in nudism. I am a nudist. It is simply what I am now. The line was behind me and I had not noticed exactly when I had crossed it and the not-noticing was itself the evidence that I had crossed it, because the crossing of a line you are still managing requires you to notice the crossing constantly, and I had stopped noticing, which meant the line was behind me, which meant I was on the other side, which meant this was simply my life now.

That is how it happens. Not in a single dramatic moment of liberation, usually, though some people have those and they are real and valid and worth honoring. It happens in the accumulation of ordinary moments that gradually produce the extraordinary fact of a changed life, the specific process of becoming something new through repetition and experience and the particular education of showing up enough times that the novelty fades and what remains is simply the truth of what you are.

This book is about that process.