The Year I Lost (and Found) My Innocence

 Something that keeps coming up for me this week—my birthday week—is the idea of innocence. Or maybe it’s the lack thereof.

I’ve been quietly reflecting on it. This question keeps tapping on the door of my mind, uninvited but persistent:
When did you lose your innocence?

Now, before your mind jumps straight to trauma—because sure, that might come up, and that’s okay—this question feels less about events and more about essence. It’s not so much about what happened to me, but rather… when did I stop floating through life with wonder, with the unfiltered joy and lightness of being?

So I ask you:
How would you define innocence? How does it show up for you?

For me, innocence is awe. Wonder. A kind of unshaken joy in the moment. A time before pressure and performance, before fear and comparison crept in. Before I felt the world expected things of me.

When I reflect on that question, I go all the way back—maybe before I was five years old. And yes, something traumatic did happen to me at that age. But honestly, that didn’t fully take my innocence. It may have chipped away at my trust, but not that spark of unspoiled joy. Not yet.

In trying to locate the moment, I explore a few possibilities.

• Was it in middle school, when I was bullied?

• Was it my first heartbreak in high school?

• Was it in university, when I realized no one was coming to save me and life wasn’t a guaranteed gentle stroll?

This morning, as I was prepping for yoga class, I was looking for a reading for savasana. Normally, I plan ahead—but not this time. Five minutes before I had to leave, I found myself standing in front of my bookshelf, scanning the usual suspects: yoga texts, meditation guides, volumes of poetry.

Then I saw it—a slender, nearly invisible book nestled between bigger ones. Narrower than my fingertip. I pulled it out, curious.

It was Poets of the Confederation, edited by Malcolm Ross. I remember studying it back when I was working on my BA in English. I opened it—and there, inside the front cover, were poems I had written in 1987 or 1988.

Eighteen or nineteen years old.

Right around the time I think I lost something.

Here’s the first one:

My Lost Dream
My lost dream whispers softly in my ear
and echos loudly in the dark
Someday was a day in the past
when there was no dirt under my unicorn’s feet
and there was silence in the night.

And then this one:

How Far
How far can a little girl fall?
She can fall into the vast pit of her own ignorance
and scrape her dear sweet knees on the floor of her soul.

I mean… wow. If that’s not the sound of innocence slipping through your fingers, I don’t know what is.

University brought challenges.

• A professor who tried to cross lines.

• A string of admirers whose attention didn’t always feel safe.

• Loneliness. Pressure. That tight ache of figuring out who I was while trying to survive the weight of being young and unsure.

Here’s the last one I found, a bit of a content warning here—it’s raw:

[Untitled]
The only thing worse than being alone
is being in a crowd.
Having loads of friends,
but none seeing faces.
Faces with holes where their eyes should be.
Feeling that maybe they inform me that I have no eyes.
Waking up in the morning surrounded by these apparitions—
eating with them, dancing with them, working with them,
anything but accepting them.

Reading these now, with 56 years of life behind me, I feel such tenderness for that girl. That version of me who wrote poems about lost dreams and scraped souls.

And it brings up that familiar question:

If you could go back and talk to your younger self, what would you say?

I would tell her:

It’s going to be okay.

It won’t always be easy.

But there will be more ups than downs.

You’ll have children. Help raise a stepdaughter. Snuggle grandbabies.
You’ll have wonderful people in your life. Real ones. Loving ones.
You’ll create a beautiful, wild life full of meaning.

You’ll dream again—and this time, you’ll catch some of those dreams mid-flight.

You'll fall in love. Fall out of love. Fall into yourself.

You’ll rise, again and again. Even when you scrape your dear sweet knees on the soul-floor, you’ll rise. You’ll stand. You’ll walk forward.

And here's the truth, friends:

That innocence we lose? We get it back.
Not the same kind—but something wiser. Gentler. More grounded in reality, yet still lit with stardust.

We lose our innocence.
And we find it again.
Over and over.

And maybe that’s what living is.