(TRIGGER WARNING : Child sexual abuse, bullying)

Innocence has always been a difficult concept for me.

I lost mine at a very early age. How early, I am not exactly sure, but it was definitely preschool. So I was three, four, five years old, or somewhere in there.

I lost it when my father, Larry Donald Bertrand, formerly of 135 Belmont Street, Summerside, Prince Edward Island, Canada, molested me in the showers of a place called simply The Spa in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.

And when you lost your innocence at so young an age, you never really have a sense of loss like you would have if it happened when you were older. I never had a sense of my own innocence, and so I had no idea what I had lost. My memories of that point in my life are half-formed and hazy at the best of times. So my sense of “before” and “after” is blurry as well.

Still, I can remember being a happy, adorable, energetic child who charmed the socks out of bemused adults with his precocious intelligence and unusual way of seeing things.

And I can remember being…. not that any more. Somehow I became the brittle, fragile kid that couldn’t handle school and fell to the bottom of the totem pole and didn’t know what to do about it. Somehow, I acquired the fatal weakness of spirit that has been my primary problem for my entire life. I became the sort of person who gives up, the sort of person who crumbles in the face of real pressure and just wants to give up and get away and hide.

It didn’t have to be that way. If the incident at The Spa had never happened, I could easily see myself having been a far stronger, more ambitious, more aware, more socially adept personality. The sort of person who fights for themselves as opposed to the kind that tries to hide from the world instead.

But I lost something that day. Something I have to call my innocence. It’s the only word that fits.

Historically, I have not given a lot of thought to innocence. For a long time, I protected myself from the realization of my loss by telling myself that innocence is just another word for ignorance, and you are always better off knowing, so innocence is not something anyone should be sorry to lose. You didn’t know how the world really worked, and now you do. Sure, that can be a shock, and even depressing, but you are still better prepared to deal with the world as it is now, so you are better off.

It is hard to argue with that logic. That doesn’t mean it’s right, it just means it’s extremely plausible. As a way to protect myself from what had happened to me, it worked quite well for decades. Decades in which I didn’t exactly forget about what happened to me, I just stopped thinking about it.

When it resurfaced in my mind, it would always come as a shock because the knowledge that it happened had been right there in my mind all along. It’s like suddenly realizing that there’s a wolf in the room with you, and that you had seen the wolf dozens of times without noticing it before now.

So I gave short shrift to the concept of innocence for a long time. Maybe that was okay for the sleepwalking sheep of the world, but I was too smart to accept ignorance as a blessing. I knew things.

Things I was too young to know, arguably. I have lived my life never, ever resisting knowledge. In that sense, I have lived my life wide open to the effects of whatever came along. Whether it was input from the world or things I figured out on my own, I have denied myself the protection of ignorance at every turn.

I want to understand things, and you can’t understand them unless you are willing to go wherever your quest for understanding leads, no matter how dark, how disturbing, how outside of normal knowledge, and above all, no matter what sort of damage it does to me emotionally.

My quest for understanding drives me over or through all obstacles and emotional damage be damned. And this leads to a very detailed and nuanced understanding of the world. It leads to great understanding.

But it is also quite harsh and unforgiving. There should be room for at least some self-protection. Maybe I would be a stronger person if I had given myself a break now and then. Maybe I inflicted a lot of my own injuries.

Maybe there is more to life than being a rugged and fearless intellectual. Maybe sometimes you have to stop letting the huge and powerful dog of your intellect drag you through knothole after knothole in its headlong pursuit of understanding.

If so, I don’t know if I am capable of it.

Still, I can no longer reject the concept of innocence so blithely. I have always sensed that there was something that other people had that I did not. A sense of safety, of connectedness, of not being alone in the world.

A sense that everything was okay, more or less, and that if they needed something or someone, it was there for them. A sense of the presence of others even when they are all alone.

A sense of safety.

And maybe that is called innocence. Maybe the ignorance is not the point of innocence, it’s just its most obvious sign. Maybe the real meaning of innocence is that inner sense of safety that can either be preserved long enough for you to be ready to know more or brutally ripped asunder by traumatic experience, leaving only a lifelong scar in its place.

Maybe there really is value in a return to innocence.

Even when it feels like the first time you have ever been there.

That’s all for today, folks. See you all tomorrow.