I don’t know. Three perfectly respectable words. I have spent most of my life avoiding them. Ask me a question and my brain immediately goes to work. What do I know about this? What have I read? What have I heard? Can I figure it out? Is there something similar I can draw from? Can I make a reasonable assumption? Apparently there has been a small emergency-response team living inside my head whose sole responsibility is preventing me from ever saying: I have absolutely no idea. For most of my life, I thought this was curiosity. And some of it is. I genuinely like knowing things. I like researching. I…

There are entire stretches of my life I can prove happened but don’t particularly remember living. I went to work. I raised children. I cooked dinners, paid bills, drove thousands of kilometres, attended meetings, bought groceries, remembered birthdays, solved problems and did all the other things that constitute a life when written down on paper. I was there. That’s the strange part. I wasn’t unconscious. I wasn’t wandering around in some fugue state. I was competent. Often extremely competent. I just wasn’t entirely in it. For most of my life, I didn’t know there was a difference. I thought this was adulthood. You get up. You do what needs doing.…