I hear yelling and laughter down the hall – they're out again. Our dorm's nudists don't have a shower party every night, but they seem to occur more and more frequently now. If I wait long enough, maybe they'll be done before I need to use the bathroom. I work on some backup plans; worst case scenario, I can take my stuff to another bathroom. It’s a little more inconvenient, but I'd rather walk a little further than wade through a mob of exposed genitalia.

How does this "normal boy" turned "normal man" feel about his naked body? His penis? I'm still unsure of many of the answers to these questions. From the inside out, I've struggled to feel normal (comfortable) in my own skin. This masculine body. Starting with that particular appendage.

How do I deal with unmet sexual desire? It's a question which led me to ask, what is my sexual desire? Of course, "sexual desire" is a category with a lot of things in it. "There's a lot of different fish in that bucket," I told myself. But let's not call it a bucket. Let's call it an aquarium so all the fish have plenty of room to swim around, and so we can get a good look at them.

For so many years I thought I was just dirty, lustful, and awful for thinking all these terrible sexual thoughts. I was filled with constant shame because the sexually intrusive thoughts kept coming. The realization that I can actually, with practice, redirect my own thoughts, is more freeing than I can write.

I still have that Link costume somewhere in my closet. Perhaps it's the wandering through the woods that I love, the isolation, the music; or, perhaps it's something deeper that has stuck with me after all these years. Perhaps it's that I feel like the protagonist: adrift in time, unsure whether I'm a child or a man. This is how I feel as I move back into my childhood bedroom – the place where my sexual trauma occurred.

It's now been three to four years since I've written those blogs on cuddling and nudity, and I've shared many cuddles since with guys I've met through YOB. But have any of my thoughts changed since I wrote those posts?