Naked.

OUR FIRST GUEST POST--get excited!! I am honored to welcome Jas as she celebrates and shares a voice of her own:

After a very untimely “wardrobe malfunction,” a friend asked me why I had such a hard time with people being naked. Said friend was trying on various outfits when the malfunction happened and I, in my infiniteness awkwardness, stared directly at my laptop in an effort to avoid as much eye contact as humanly possible.

I come from a small family and for most of my life I have lived only with three other people in the house; my older brother and my parents. I never grew up around women despite the fact that my mother had 3 sisters and a number of nieces. I suppose the lack of an estrogen bath when I was younger can explain some of my discomfort with my own body.

When I was 8, my parents decided to move our family to the Philippines. If you don’t know anything about this beautiful island nation, Google it! The Philippines is a sub-tropical island located in southeast Asia, it’s close to the equator so the weather is typically hot. While there, I attended a conservative Catholic school in a neighboring town that had very strict dress code. We had the typical plaid skirt and white blouse uniform from Monday-Thursday but on Fridays the girls were forced to wear the most God-forsaken outfit ever. Since Fridays were “gym” days (we didn’t have anything close to a gymnasium), girls’ uniforms were white cotton sweatpants and a white cotton t-shirt. Sweat much?

I became accustomed to this very conservative style of dress. Administrators (aka Priests, one of whom fathered a high school senior’s child at our sister school) were trying to maintain decency with the young women at our school at a time when salaciously dressed teenyboppers like Britney Spears and the Spice Girls were infiltrating Filipino culture.

So what’s all this have to do with me hating nakedness? I never knew how to appreciate and love my body. I was taught at a very young age to hide. Hide everything! Hide the precious jewel that is my body! Even after moving to the States, I carried this mantra with me. You best believe I wore jeans in the scorching heat because I didn’t want to be “indecent.” To this day, I do not have a mirror in my room at home because I’d just rather not see my body but I’ve slowly but surely come to embrace nakedness. For a very long time, I found it very difficult to change in front of my roommates but I’ve been more intentional about doing this lately.

I was 20 years old when I first wore a 2-piece bathing suit. (Despite being a tropical island, it is common practice for women in the provinces to wear shorts and a t-shirt while at the beach or swimming pool in the Philippines.) I can’t tell you how insanely liberating that day was, feeling the wind and sand on my skin instead of a sopping wet t-shirt made me feel deep gratitude for a side of Mother Nature I had never experienced. Last summer, while on a road trip with my mother, we stopped at a beach. My fashion-forward mother had never seen me in a 2-piece bathing suit before and she was amazed when I nonchalantly took off my shirt and revealed myself to the rest of the beach. Roughly translated, my mother said, “You’ve got balls.” I responded, “I can’t have fun if I keep hiding.”

-jas