2006.07.29 The Guardian
I'm not used to talking about myself. In fact, I've kept myself hidden away for 30 years - not really opening up to anyone - friends, family or partners. It's only recently I've realised just how much I've refused to allow myself to be seen, and why.
As with most insecurities, it stems from childhood. My parents were highly idealistic and my earliest memories are of CND marches, radical politics and - nakedness. Naturism was my father's big rebellion: coming from a repressed Catholic family, it was his two fingers up to convention. He was, and is, a follower of the creed of naturism - the belief that by stripping off you can also strip off centuries of negative social conditioning and show yourself to the world as God intended.
As I was old enough to understand it, it was a belief I came to share.
As a family, we went on naturist holidays from the earliest age, sharing a beach with hundreds of people from across Europe in one of the huge naturist holiday camps in Bordeaux. The holidays were great. Cycling around the camp, aged eight, in the heat of the French summer, was my first taste of independence. And somehow, if everyone's got their clothes off, it feels as if no one has. But at school it marked me out as being different. There was no escaping it: the holiday photos on the walls at home weren't like other people's holiday photos.
It is common knowledge in naturist circles that children tend to fall out of it when they reach their teenage years. My sister was the first to refuse, covering up at the resorts as she turned 11 or so. I carried on for a while, but it wasn't long before we stopped going on holiday as a family.
I still believed, though. I fought naturism's corner under pressure from the bullies. When the teasing started, I'd use the argument I'd learned from my father: "Why should the human body be something to be ashamed of?" I don't remember if it worked.
It wasn't something I really returned to over the years since then. I've always felt that it gave me a healthy sense of my body - I'm happy to be naked if I'm alone, and have always been comfortable naked with the few girlfriends I've had. But in other areas of my life, I've always been anything but comfortable. At school, aged about 11, if I ever became the centre of attention I became so self-conscious that my vision would blur and my brain would start to shut down. As I got older I found myself unable to relax in groups. In meetings at work, or on the rare occasions I'd go to pubs with friends, the fear of being seen was always there. I dealt with it by effectively locking myself away: I wanted to be more sociable, but simply wasn't up to the task.
About a year ago, I started working as a video journalist, and I was being encouraged to appear on camera. I found that I couldn't do it - it brought out an insecurity that, at its worst, left me nearly hyperventilating. The overwhelming feeling was that I wanted to retreat into myself.
Therapy isn't something I'd ever considered - I like to think of myself as someone who just gets on with it - but I knew that some things were not right. So I went on a course. It took a long time to realise that naturism could be responsible. Checking through my life, I realised how much this fear of exposure had cut me off from people by not feeling able to open up to them.
Of course, what I am saying is heresy within the naturist movement. "Children take to nudity like ducks to water," British Naturism's website says. "As people grow up, they are taught by social convention that nudity is wrong or shocking." So why do I think it had such an effect on me? I suppose the simple fact of being different in a hard school was difficult enough for a sensitive child like me, and left me with a sense of shame. But maybe society isn't responsible for making us wear clothes - maybe we do it for other reasons.
I now think that naturism suffers from an idealised view of human nature: the natural state is not always to be whole and happy. Shame and insecurity are just as much a part of the human experience. Clothes are seen, symbolically, to hide it. I believe the effect of being forced to keep everything on show caused me to create walls and layers to hide behind and within. But I'm doing my best to take them down, and allow the real me to be seen.
