The first time I ever took a nude, or what I called an artsy nude, was in high school. Then, one day, I realized I could post them, too, from one of my private accounts. I loved turning to paintings of renaissance women and Greek goddesses for inspiration. I had no idea if she was afraid. But she felt alive.

Nude is a term that gives me the creeps. Nude were the stockings I flipped past when I started wearing them as a teenager, preferring warm bronze colors in summer and dark coppery stockings in the winter. Bold red, ghostly white, or glittery lips were what called me out of the tasteful, painfully alienated, and safely ordered Waspy world into which I was born, and from which I yearned to flee. Nudes were what the portrait photographer showed me when I applied to be his assistant.

In it, a diverse group of people pose nude and talk about their relationships with their bodies, all in the spirit of body positivity. For the issue, eight people bared all — emotionally and physically — in the name of self-love. It was such a redefinition of beauty, and I wanted to pay that forward. Now any chance I have to share that awareness of what bodies look like and what people of value look like — which, spoiler alert, is everyone — I jump at the chance. When I stopped shaving my legs, there were two days of anxiety, and on the third, I realized nobody cares.

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