Nude Modeling for my Friend Crushes

On Breaking All the Rules and Doing Something Terrifying

When I moved to the DC area a year and a half ago, I overlapped briefly with a good friend who had been living here for a few years. She was convinced she knew the perfect strategy for me to make friends in the area: joining a casual figure drawing group one of her friends had helped start. She knew the crowd and was confident I would like them. After all, they’re a bunch of cool, artsy queer people, and I’m, uh, also queer.

The figure drawing group is a mix of friends and friends of friends who get together monthly and draw each other. Anyone’s welcome, within the limits of whatever space it’s being hosted in. They originally meant to all chip in to book a model, but then they realized it was fun and empowering to model for each other. So, at the beginning of each session, they pass around a signup sheet and people sign up to model for poses of varying lengths, from 10 1-minute gesture drawing poses up through a final 15-minute pose. Modeling is optional and you can model in whatever amount of clothes you feel comfortable in, but in my experience, most people model and most models take off most of their clothes.

There’s something you should know about me: I am not a naked person. I mean, I opt out of nudity. I was that teenager at sleepovers hoping for a moment when everyone else was distracted to change into my pajamas. I’m not down for a spontaneous skinny dip in the lake. I don’t hang out naked in saunas with friends. I wear pants in almost all situations.

It’s partly just my personality. I harbor a certain flavor of shyness that just precludes showing a lot of skin (though apparently not one that precludes elaborate disclosures of my inner world on the internet). It’s nuanced.

The other part of my thumbs down to casual nudity is due to self-consciousness. Here’s something I think a lot of people don’t realize about chronic illness: alongside the few big things that my body really can’t do (e.g., standing, keeping my joints in place), there are also a thousand small things it does quite poorly. Some of them are the common, albeit embarrassing, nuisances some subset of the population deal with, but I have more than my fair share of those, they tend to be more severe, and I have fewer resources to treat them. My skin is particularly unhappy, and that will probably never not be true. I have an unfortunate case of chronic inflammation that’s caused me to constantly have sores on my scalp for at least the last decade (it’s folliculitis, infected hair follicles). That’s what happens to hair I just let grow. Body hair removal is something I gave up on forever ago; my skin just could not take it. I’m quite a hairy person, and that’s just how I have to live, in my unaltered, hairy state. I also have eczema, acne, scars, acne scars, stretch marks, and “chicken skin.” The excessive, abnormal, or inexplicable presence of some of these are literally in the diagnostic criteria for EDS, the genetic disease I have.

How I feel about all of that is complicated. I don’t hate it. Most of the time I don’t think any of it really matters. But I also do tend to hide my skin. I don’t hate it, but it’s not for general consumption.

There’s another complicating element to my relationship to my body at this moment—I’m currently living in a markedly larger body than the one I had a few years ago. I’ve been stuck in an utterly relentless episode of depression for the last few years (can you even call something an “episode,” when it’s lasted years?). I’m getting great treatment, and that’s definitely helped, but I haven’t yet come out the other side of the depression. It’s like a little alien entered my brain and messed with all my appetite dials, turning some way up and some way down.

Bodies change, and mine has. Gradually, my old clothes stopped fitting. First my pants. Then my shirts. I removed them from my wardrobe in waves. I kept my favorites and sealed them away in vacuum bags in bins I keep in the shed, in case the change in my body reverses itself. I bought new clothes, found new styles I like—unlined bras and straight leg pants that flatter my new, softer body.

It’s possible to like your body but still not want to show it to the world. Maybe it feels somewhat fragile, my affection for my physical appearance right now. I liked my body before. I like my body now. But sometimes the fat phobia that’s such a part of this world seeps in and I feel terrible about the way I look now. I try to let those feelings come and go, like all the others.

The first time I went to figure drawing, it was summer and the group was modeling in bathing suits by the pool. I didn’t own a bathing suit (an excellent excuse!), so I modeled fully clothed. Being stared at by everyone felt strange, but not in an especially bad way.

I should mention that I don’t draw. I do some very casual watercolor, but drawing scares me and I find it frustrating. But that day, I actually enjoyed it. Most of the poses are so brief, when perfectionism rears its demoralizing head, you just have to let it be and keep going.

I immediately liked the people, and also found them intimidating. A friend group that starts something like this? “I love hanging out, but I think we should add art, nudity, and strangers.” Those are sauna people. Sauna people are cooler than wouldn’t-be-caught-dead-in-a-sauna people. It’s just a fact. Everyone was kind, welcoming, and seemingly very self-assured. Terrifying.

The second time I went to figure drawing, it was an unseasonably warm day in autumn. We met in someone’s living room. Many of the people there that day were new. There were snacks and everyone was chatting, nervous people trying to be friendly. The modeling sign-up sheet was passed around and in a split-second decision, I wrote my name down for a 10-minute pose before I could think myself out of it.

There was truly no pressure to model, so why did I do it? Because I knew it would be good for me? To impress my therapist when I told her about it later? I think I was in some kind of bravery trance: Go to event with intimidating strangers. Talk to them. Draw. Take off your clothes. Why not follow through completely?

Mine was one of the last poses. As other people modeled, I reassured myself that I could always keep as much of my clothes on as I wanted to. But I already knew I wouldn’t. Drawing is a form of mindfulness. Your only job is to see what is, and put it down on the page. It is nothing like the way we usually look at people. Maybe I wanted to be looked at that way. Maybe I knew it would be healing.

Different bodies are so different from each other—not just in the obvious ways, in ways so much more subtle. In every arc and shadow, and how we carry ourselves. We just are the way we are.

We took a break before my pose. People got snacks and sat around chatting. After a few minutes, I went to take my clothes off so I could ease into being looked at somewhat gradually and so I would be ready when it was time to resume. Nobody watches each other undress or dress. It’s so much more intimate to be in the process of taking off your clothes than it is to be unclothed. We change in the corner, and people try not to look over.

I painstakingly undressed, folding my clothes in a sheepish pile by the wall, leaving on just my cool lesbian boxers. Then I rejoined the circle of people, sitting on the floor by where I’d be modeling. I tried to chat with the others, but I couldn’t pay attention. I felt the same self-consciousness I often feel, aware of my hairy legs, my round stomach. It occurred to me that I have literally had this nightmare—a group of people sitting around talking and I’m there inexplicably mostly naked. And yet, it was fine. I was fine.

People finished their snacks and made their way back into the circle. Pencils and paper were retrieved. The most awkward part was picking a pose. Because of my POTS, I knew I needed to be mostly horizontal. I decided to lie on the ground with my feet up on a stool, ankles crossed. I didn’t know what to do with my arms. I picked some bizarre position, with one hand dangling aimlessly in the air.

Someone started a timer and everyone began to draw. I was staring at the ceiling. They were staring at me. It was funny, the unreality of it. All the rules, broken. They glanced up and down, up and down, between me and their papers. Some held their pencil up between us, squinting to figure my proportions. They were seeing me as I was, in that moment, in that pose, from that perspective. If drawing is a kind of mindfulness, being drawn completes the experience. You, too, become the object of non-judgement.

At the end, we all have the option of sharing what we drew. We went around and people held up their sketchbooks, flipping through the sketches as the poses grew longer and the drawings more detailed. Each pose echoed around the room, one stance rendered from a dozen angles. People commented on the drawings, but never the bodies. What they had fun drawing, what they struggled to capture, what they especially liked in someone else’s sketch.

I was momentarily afraid to see what others had drawn of me, but as people shared, I relaxed. Mine was a body among all these bodies. I saw what they had seen, and I was alright.

I’m fascinated by the question of what happens if we bear to look reality dead in the eye. Does it crush us? Does it set us free? I can’t say either happened to me. After figure drawing, I felt briefly invincible. Then I went back to my life, and back to not showing much skin. I am still not a sauna person, but if you need someone to draw, you might be able to convince me.

P.S. Know someone else you think might enjoy this? Please share it! Word of mouth is one of the main ways for my work to find the right audience.