I woke one day and discovered my life had been pickpocketed. Most of my memories (90% if you want to be precise) were gone between the time I was on the operating table and the time I was in hospital. The doctors were all over the place with terms like retrograde and anterograde amnesia but nobody could tell me why my mind had become a half erased chalkboard.

Hemochromatosis sounds like something out of a medical wizard's book really, it's just that my body had a habit of hoarding iron like a magpie. It accumulated in the organs until something gave way (gall bladder first, then the liver) and both of those gave up the ghost. I was in hospital, a complete stranger to myself, with no idea where I was or who was going to be looking for me. The world outside the window was still turning, but inside my head it was all thick and foggy. Each day was a bit steeper to get through.

What I Forgot. What Stayed.

My memory was a dropped vase—shards scattered across the floor, some too tiny to ever find again.

What I forgot was my own story. My own history. The details of my life. I'll sometimes hear myself laugh and it startles the hell out of me. The sound is utterly alien.

What stayed: Instinct. I still knew I was right-handed. I could write. I could knit. My hands remembered, even when my mind did not.

So I started writing it all down—the grief, the gaps, the odd feeling of time travelling through your own life with half the map. I was writing it all on my blogs which meant I always knew where my writing was. I have lost notebooks in many states and many countries.

So who was I before the great memory heist?

Before amnesia wiped the slate clean I was Michelle Kathleen O'Kane. I was a writer, a maker, a bit of a dab hand at all sorts of creative things and small business schemes. After the surgery I became a detective in my own life, hunting through my old journals and diaries and any scraps of information I could find in the public record.

Education: Degree in Creative Arts, nearly finished with an MFA in Creative Writing.

My old diaries were all over the place in terms of what they revealed. I was a published romance novelist, had three books out. Who would have thought?

Turns out, I’m handy with yarn and needles, too. I once ran an art gallery in Genoa and can coax a tune out of a few different instruments—at least, that’s what the evidence suggests.