Naturism, initially, takes us out of our comfort zone. There’s a quickening of the heartbeat involved as we make our first steps into the naked lifestyle, and it is (unless inherently exhibitionist at heart) going to be nerve-wracking. I wrote about my own debut into naturism away back when we first began the blog.

For new readers, I’ll quickly re-cap that it was at Cap D’Agde, France, when my cousin and I secured waitressing jobs for the summer through a friend of my uncle. This was the summer after I’d finished school, and about to embark on university life, and it seemed a good way to supplement my measly student grant and top up the bank account for the forthcoming freshman year at uni.

I didn’t know Agde was naturist, and those first couple of days were an eye-opener as we slaved, serving naked person after naked person, for long hours, six days a week. And then we got a day off. My cousin readily stripped off, leaving me sweating in my bikini beside the pool at Heliopolis until I could take it no more, the discomfort of the clothes, the feeling that all eyes were on me for being dressed and….I stripped off in the usual debutant manner, the bikini top removed while remaining face down, the first public appearance of my boobs and, sweating under a French summer sun and with enough comprehension of the language to know that the sign ‘Nudite Obligatoire’ demanded the bikini briefs disappeared if I was going to cool down in the pool. Off they came, a rapid heart-pounding run to the pool and a dive into the water so as to make my ‘naked in public’ moment as short as possible.

As is often the case with naturists, you forget you’re naked within an hour or so. I remember thinking it felt so natural swimming without a costume. Of course there was the same hurried dash back to my sunbed when I climbed out, but as the day went on my confidence (as much in the fact that not everyone was looking at me as anything else) grew.

We were billeted in a rather small apartment within the naturist area, my cousin and I, and from then on nudity was par for the course once our shifts were over. I’d reached the point where I’d have been happy -much to my own surprise- to have worked naked during the day, but the restaurateur had a rule that was essentially ‘when dealing with food, not in the nude’ 🙂

Twenty years and dozens of naturist holidays later as a confirmed naturist it’s all entirely ‘natural’, of course, and I think nothing of being naked in a public place (assuming the dress code permits, of course). Cap D’Agde has changed, and not for the better in my opinion. Again, I’ve been critical of it over the past three years of blogging, labelling it as having become a sordid swingers’ paradise rather than a genuine naturist location (although there are pockets of genuine naturist activity within the massive complex).

But I well remember that ‘debut’ moment. We all do. And we’ve all got a story to tell. How strange and then normal it felt. The circumstances in which the debut developed. Spur of the moment? Planned in advance?

What I’d like to do throughout 2015 is to hear your stories about your nude debut. Drop me a notecard with your story and I’ll try to appropriate models to re-enact the moment(s) in an SL context.

Don’t worry if you think your writing isn’t up to scratch, we can tweak it into ‘journalese’.

Later today (or Sunday, depending on whether we get the photos back in time), I hope to have the first of these tales published. Inspiration for the series has come from the fact that, recently, I’ve either been in conversation with, in world, or have received a notecard from different avatars in which the topic came up. We write about things that, in turn, inspire avatars to provide their own tales and fond memories of that first time.

It will be an occasional series throughout the year, if and when we receive any input from readers, and I think it’s appropriate that our own writers (being naturist is a pre-requisite of a staffing job) also tell their own stories of their entry into naturism. In the meantime, here’s a few photos that illustrate Agde away back in the days when I first made my own nude debut.

Ella