Nudity, the Peace Corps, and How I’m Changing the World with My Pants

I spend as much time being naked as I can. It’s such a good feeling- a comfortable, satisfying feeling. When I'm not wearing clothes I feel relaxed, I feel confident, I feel beautiful, I feel Me. As a kid, it was a struggle for my parents to keep clothes on me sometimes. Even as a pre-adolescent, my bother would tell me disgustedly to “go put some clothes on. You’re gross.” I remember him apologizing to his friends on a couple occasions about the sister who would run around the house flaunting nothing but her loud voice and her pinkish skin. As an adult, while people usually bunch up and stay in little groups when skinny-dipping, I am the seemly brave one who immediately begins jumping through the water like a dolphin as I make my way downstream. Feeling life directly and fully against the skin is so freeing! I lament mindsets that limit nudity to sexuality. I genuinely believe that people would feel happier if they spent more time being naked.

Though I love dressing up and playing with my gluttonous variety of clothing, I prolong the routine time-to-button-up-the-pants-and-leave-the-house for as long as I can. When I put on my clothes reality changes. My feelings of Me being Me don’t stop, they just change. I become a different Me. Dressed, I am the Angela that the rest of the world sees, and no longer the Me I like to be the most.

Due to the fact that I am always living with someone else in the house, I have been forced to develop a taste for robes. Luckily, being wrapped up in a soft, plush robe is the second best thing to being naked. This morning I woke up with achy joints, swollen glands, a fever, a bruised ego, and disappointed... not to mention it was cold out- definitely a stay home day. From my bed I can hear someone upstairs awake and making breakfast, so I reach for the fluffy robe before I head upstairs. It’s pink. It’s oversized. It is warm. I love it, but what I love even more is that it’s just me underneath.

If it were up to me, I would spend all of today, robed or disrobed, at home reading or watching the Today Show, but my earache dictates a need to take a trip outside where not wearing clothing is punishable by law. Like the unwilling kid who is trained to obey, I begrudgingly rifle through the top drawer and pick out the most comfortable and desirable pair of underwear. I smile because they are cute and pink. I like having toasty feet, so put on a pair of socks that are pink and fluffy. Living in Humboldt County and being sick gives me the double-OK to wear old sweats wherever the heck I want. I happen to see a pair of sweats on the ground and put them on. My mom gave them to me and they are pink. I love them. On goes the favorite bra. Oh my gosh, it’s pink! I realize that piece by piece, I have unconsciously covered myself entirely in light pink.

I look into my open closet and think about how in the past 5 years I have transitioned my wardrobe from only dark/black clothes to the whole spectrum of pinks, though sometimes dabbling a little in purples. Being a girl, anything having to do with a change in clothing choices marks a profound life transition. I distinctly remember the beginning of this new era, too. It began shortly after coming home from a long turn in Costa Rica. At the time I was deeply in need of connecting with American culture, I was skinny, and I had a fat Peace Corps re-adjustment allowance burning in my wallet- all the key ingredients for full-out shopping spree.

I re-connected with myself and my country the way true women capitalists with great new figures are supposed to- by buying a whole new wardrobe at a giant mall in a big city. Upon showing my mother my cute new clothes, as women capitalists are also required to do, she observed a majority of the pieces were pink, “you always bought such dark stuff before,” she said.

“Hummm… maybe I like pink now,” I both wonder and declare out loud, admiring my fully clothed, skinny, tan, Peace-Corpsed American self in the mirror.

Though this next profound connection was not realized until the drafting of the 5th paragraph of this blog, I am now enlightened as to why I have such a strong internal desire to wear pink. As it is assumed all Volunteers are supposed to do during Peace Corps service, while in Costa Rica I connected to both myself and my sense of community in a way that I hadn’t before. This connection relates directly to my wearing of clothes, specifically pink ones. You see, before beginning service, all Peace Corps Trainees must first be sworn in as official Peace Corps Volunteers. Though I don’t remember exactly, I’m sure during the swearing in ceremony we also took an oath that somewhere states that as Peace Corps Volunteers we have a duty to develop a deeper connection and awareness of the self, and somehow positively bridge that to make a full-circle, holistic, synergistic, enduring, and sustainable connection between the self, community, and the world. If I didn’t take that oath during the Peace Corps, I’m positive I did something really similar both times I graduated from HSU, or at least when I was paying dues for the NASW. But I’m pretty sure it happened in the Peace Corps, because it’s after my service that I started buying all the pink clothes.

As a PCV, a two-time HSU graduate, and a member of the NASW, it is my duty, times three, at the least, to do good in my own life, and use that to contribute to the greater good of my community, which then, in turn, contributes to the greater good of the world, which, in turn, helps to continue the cycle through fostering strong yet connected individuals. *phew!* Boy do I have a big job on my hands!

I have spent a lot of money and life on these oaths, so I am fully committed to this cause. As a conscious citizen of world, I am obligated to link my good to the greater good, and I strive to do this in my daily life. How do I do this, you ask? Like the mutual aid system of the individual, the community, and the world, this is when the sum of the blog is greater than its individual parts: When I am naked, I feel like I am the best Angela I can be. My skin is pink, my clothes are pink. Wearing pink clothing is as close as being naked in public as it gets. Bam- There ya go. Now it all makes sense.