Jill Thomas is a rambler, traveler, and storyteller with a big laugh who believes life takes her where she needs to go, no matter the roundabout path.
I like to be fully dressed - long pants, boxy sweaters, flowing linen shirts, wool socks, rambling shoes, and raincoats are the kinds of clothes I feel the most myself in.
I struggle with hot Florida weather because it makes me choose between feeling naked or hot. I don’t like wearing tank tops. I sleep in P.J. pants and a tee. I avoid changing in front of others and walk through locker rooms wrapped in a towel.
Being naked is not my happy place. Yet, for reasons outside my control, I have spent a lot of time naked in public places with people I don't know.
It started young. I was raised by wolves, and everyone knows wolves love running around naked. In our house, parents walked around without clothes.
My mom's favorite beach when I was growing up was Wreck Beach, Vancouver Canada's notorious nude beach. It is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful beaches in town, and you have to climb down a big hill to get there and back up when you leave, so it's lawless.
When I was a kid in the seventies, Wreck Beach was a paradise of twirling naked hippies and their kids. Almost everything is allowed at Wreck Beach, and yet it was then, and remains so today, a family-friendly place as long as you have the kind of family that embraces being naked.
When I moved to Toronto and went to university, I thought my naked days were blissfully over. It's too cold in eastern Canada to run about without your clothes, and my friends, thankfully, shared my preference for being fully dressed.
But then fate forced me to embrace being naked in public again, but this time with people with the power to cancel my paycheque. A couple of years after I graduated from university, I got a job as a Media Coordinator for The Friends of Clayoquot Sound, then a year later, a role as a Forest Campaigner at Greenpeace.
I dislike making generalizations, but in my experience, environmentalists don't care about wearing bathing suits. And, when you're a forest activist, you spend a lot of time in water - especially hot tubs. The Canadian rainforests in British Columbia's Clayoquot Sound and the Great Bear Rainforest were primarily protected by folks who planned their campaigns in hot tubs surrounded by towering ancient coniferous trees and bracing cold North Pacific winds.
Critical campaign decisions were made in the indescribably beautiful hot tubs at the Hollyhock Retreat Center on the remote Cortes Island. Other times we were in wild hot springs in Clayoquot Sound and Bella Coola. Once, we drifted under the stars in the middle of Knight Inlet in a floating hot tub.
The social mores in this group were straightforward. Wearing bathing suits in a hot tub was a despicable bourgeois affliction. So no one wore bathing suits, not even me, even though I wanted to. While others would sit on the tub's edge in their full naked glory while meetings dragged on into the wee hours of the night, I would do my best to remain submerged.
After years of local activism to protect British Columbia's rainforests, Greenpeace International chose our campaign to be their international priority. At the time, Greenpeace had regional offices in 32 countries fighting for a myriad of environmental issues. However, Greenpeace International, based in Amsterdam, only chose two national campaigns to support at a time. They selected globally impactful ones that they thought they could win.
In 1995, they chose to support us and were gearing up to receive millions of dollars in campaign funding, hours of strategic training, international recognition, great gear like zodiacs, computers, satellite phones, and, best of all, the Rainbow Warrior ship. It was a big deal and a testament to the years of grassroots efforts.
We hosted the planning meeting to launch this campaign in a hot tub in Tofino (the village in the heart of Clayoquot Sound), but this time, activists from all over the world, people I'd only read about, people I admired and looked up to, were there. All of us naked in a giant tub, for hours upon hours, discussing the fate of B.C.’s rainforests.
I am no longer naked in public for any reason. The last time I was at Hollyhock, I was thrilled to discover that bathing suits are now mandatory in the hot tub.
I wish I could say my preference for being fully clothed has nothing to do with my body image, but we all know that’s not true. I am naturally curvy, and we don’t live in an era where chubby is trendy.
Global research by Dove Soap (good on them) released a study called The Real Truth About Beauty showed that beauty-related pressure increases whilst body confidence decreases as girls and women grow older around the world.
Only 4% of women around the world consider themselves beautiful.
A research study published in The Journal of Women and Aging found that most women aged 50 and older are unsatisfied with their appearance. Only 12% of participants sampled reported body image satisfaction.
I suspect these statistics surprise very few because body shaming is an epidemic among women worldwide. Recently our Sole Sister Rambler Founder team discussed our individual comfort level with nudity. A friend whose body I’ve envied since high school said, “If I am honest, I feel exposed and shamed when I am naked.”
Another said, “If you have small boobs or a small butt, you are born that way. When someone is overweight, society immediately assumes you eat too much hence a very different comfort level of nudity. I don’t like being naked, and at the same time, I don’t want to see anybody else naked. That does not mean I am not okay with who I am.”
To this, I say Amen.
Even though I’m confident and happy with who I am, I don't have naked confidence. I suspect it is too late; my shyness about my body is deeply ingrained, with roots I can’t extricate and at this point I have bigger fish to fry. I feel like the next generation is doing better than we did. I hope so.
And to this, I also say Amen.
READ MORE > JT'S Tales From The Trail, Rambler Cafe Blog
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