Easels are propped up around the room and students are listening to the pre-lecture droll from their instructor. The door opens again. More students file in. They scrape through their toolboxes for chalk. Or are they pencils? Black papers hang from small metal clips. No, white paper.

It’s funny — the things you notice when you are utterly naked in front of a classroom full of college students.

It started as a joke, the whole thing. Being a live nude model for a university art class. The joke turned into a conversation and the conversation turned into a pinky promise, and we all know that a pinky promise is the most ancient and sacred of pacts.

The next day, I was on a professor’s schedule to be a live nude model.

My friend and I came up with conditions for our foray into the most intimate form of investigative journalism: We could not tell anyone what we planned to do, because sharing our fears and expectations could taint our unique experiences and for the same reason, we could not discuss our experiences with one another until both had modeled.

It only took me two days to break the first rule.

I have been self-conscious of my body ever since I was a kid. I generally attribute this to a particular moment from my childhood when a pastor turned me away from his service because an 8-year-old version of me had forgotten to pack dress clothes that weekend.

“Nobody wants to see your chicken legs,” he said.

And again in the middle school locker room when a group of boys cornered me after a swimming lesson.

“Do you even have pubes?”

I was a late bloomer, sure. But when I finally did sprout, I did so impressively at a final height of 6 feet 4 inches and 180 pounds — but growth spurts cannot erase scars.

I think it was deep-rooted memories such as these that made me break that first rule. I was so nervous at the thought of people seeing my lanky, thin, naked body that, without more accountability than a whispered pinky promise, I would have sent the art professor an email turning down the modeling gig in a heartbeat.

I told a small handful of close friends, and suddenly, I had more than a mere pinky promise. I had people I could not let down. People who were excited to read my article and hear about me flashing my member for $15 bucks an hour.

The nervousness subsided for a few days, replaced by excitement at the thought of getting to tell my friends about my experience, but the morning of the gig, my nerves came back with the ferocity of a hurricane.

I brought a robe and flip-flops, as per the professor’s request. I had hoped I would be able to show up early and be naked as students filed into the class, which sounded a lot better than disrobing under the gaze of 20 people at once, but that was not the case. The studio had a small changing room, and as students milled about the room preparing for me to host naked Tae Bo, I was having a panic attack behind a door that felt paper-thin — opaque.

I was a virgin — nobody had ever seen me naked — and yet, here I was, ready to share myself with the world. God, how I wanted to deep-throat a chainsaw.

In my robe, I came out of the dressing room.

That was the point of no return.

I sat in a chair in the center of the room and tried to make small talk with some of the students. Oh, really? Uh, huh. What did you say? I was not paying attention. Instead, I looked around frantically, trying to keep cool as sweat beaded down the cracks of my body, hoping that nobody I knew was in the class. The universe, of course, laughed its booming, nothing-you-can-do laugh as three students I knew entered the room. The girl from art class; the cute boy from last semester; the girl I hit on freshman year.

Go figure.

Being naked feels different when you are by yourself than when you are in front of other people. When I took off my robe, I felt unusually light as I strode under the studio lights, but it was not anything like coming out of a shower. And as I started posing — a bow and arrow, crouched in a ball with elbows to knees, starting forward as if running with a football — I came to some realizations that nothing else could have catalyzed.

The robe, the changing room, the locked bedroom door… they were all the same. I was not afraid of being naked — I was afraid of taking off the robe. In fact, I felt almost comfortable being completely bare in front of strangers. Looking down, my penis, my pubic hair, my testicles… they all felt as much welcome parts of me as my hands or feet.

The feeling of shame or embarrassment that we associate with nudity is self-inflicted. It is a prison that we create for ourselves. When I took off my robe, I felt so light because I was breaking out of the prison that I made all the way back in my childhood.

The lesson that day ended when I felt it had only just begun.

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