Over the winter of 2023, I had begun a personal campaign to get myself active again and get myself into better shape, both mentally and physically. To that end, I started going back to a nudist community website I had been a part of since 2019. My goal was to share my journey in self-betterment with a community of like minded people, and hopefully get encouragement, advice and a feeling of belonging.
At first, this is exactly what happened. I was back to drawing regularly again, I was going for walks. I was feeling quite good. But then something unexpected happened. As I became more active on this website, I began noticing a disturbing trend. There seemed to be a growing number of posters and members on the site that were engaging in activities that were less than honourable. To make matters worse, when I reported them, I was too often met with a rather dismissive attitude. Not from the owners of the site (at first), but from too many of the members. Men posting suggestive or outright sexual photos, only to have dozens of members ‘like’ the photos or comment positively on them. A member actively posting AI generated images of naked people, and being dismissive of why that’s actually a problem. Forum discussions that were created to address these concerns ending up with some very disturbing personal views from people I had previously respected. Etc.
I tried hard to put it all aside, but with a long and dismal winter surrounding me, it became too much. I couldn’t take the soft-handed moderation and the seeming acceptance of imagery that absolutely does not belong on safe, non-sexual community sites. I couldn’t take being told that “this is just what the internet is now”. So I began a bit of a spiral into depression. Losing a huge amount of trust and respect like that in one fell blow was too much for me during a time when a lack of sun and long stretches of wet, dark and cold were sucking every ounce of energy out of me were just too much.
So why exactly did it hit me so hard? Well, mostly it was because, once again, I felt ignored in a community I was trying so hard to be a positive force in. When I get upset about something, you can almost guarantee there’s a very good reason for it. I don’t just lash out at nothing. The problem is that our society, since about, oh, 2016 or so… (before that really, but there was a specific event that year that really boosted shitty things happening) has become a hotbed for bad behaviours and the acceptance of them from people that otherwise wouldn’t have allowed it before. We seem to be becoming a people that have just kind of given up on enforcing positive and progressive attitudes. It became apparent in very little time, on this nudist community, that my attempts to get people to understand that some of these behaviours were extremely negative were falling on deaf ears. The moderators said the right words much of the time, but actions tended to say otherwise.
It just felt like the same old, same old all over again. It happened on Twitter, and then, even in this space that was supposed to be better and safer and more controlled, it was happening again. So I had to make a decision. Do I continue to try and be a part of this and beat my head against a brick wall when I was already feeling low and defeated, or do I cut my losses, back out and start anew on my own? I chose the latter… but not without consequence.
Leaving the site and deleting my account really kind of hurt. It put me in a very depressed state and sent me spiralling for a while. I stopped drawing, I stopped walking. I felt hurt and angry and betrayed…. And not for the first time. It just seems every time I become a part of a community, the community does something that keeps me from wanting to be a part of it anymore. I have to consider that maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m too principled. Maybe I expect too much from people….
Or maybe people have just become too corrupted in general, and trying to remain steadfast in the face of that is still super important and that I might just have to fight it from the sidelines, on my own, and hope a few strong people follow and join me as they will.
So now I’m crawling back. I’ve started this blog site. I’m drawing again. I’ll be getting active again. I’ll get back to self-betterment regardless of how awful people seem to be becoming. At the end of the day, it’s all I can do. I can’t allow negativity to drag me down anymore.
Society might be in a death spiral, and it IS, regardless of falsely optimistic people trying to tell me to ‘think positively’ in the face of countless evidence pointing to a complete destruction of all that we keep trying to build, but it doesn’t mean I have to be in a death spiral. Just because bad actors are trying to make a mockery of nudism and are working forever to turn it into a perverted sexual activity, there are good people out there doing good things and I just have to focus on that.
I shall be one of them.