Yesterday I had the odd experience of someone DMing me on Twitter to tell me that something I had tweeted wasn’t accurate. It had to do with forest fires on PEI, a topic I actually do know a little about.

It wasn’t a nasty or unpleasant message, but rather just something I realise I have experienced all my life as a woman: being told by men that what I know to be true isn’t. In the past it was sometimes done to intimidate me, but often it was just from the bold certainty that they were right.

We had a room added to our house a few years ago. The first step was to remove a deck, which was to be saved as it was still in good shape. I wasn’t watching the crew at first, but heard more power sawing than I had expected and looked out to find they had chopped the deck into small chunks so it could be hauled away.

It was too late to save it, but I wanted to know why they had destroyed a perfectly good deck. The foreman said that it had been in bad shape and we wouldn’t have wanted it, which was clearly nonsense. I asked him to show me, and he picked up a board that had been sitting on the ground and did have a bit of rot, but could have been easily replaced when it became a problem.

He had clearly made a mistake, but instead of apologizing, he expected that I knew nothing about carpentry and would believe his nonsense. He lied, but with the hope and expectation that I would not be able to challenge him. And I didn’t challenge him beyond saying I knew the deck was in good shape because I had kept it in good shape, but he still didn’t budge and continued his work.

Lies and ignorance are two different things, of course, but it’s delivery and the belief that is behind them that can rankle.

I have long been suspicious of certainty in myself and others. As a younger person I would confidently declare that I would never do something, only to find myself later doing it, so I now try to avoid such declarations. Over time I have learned to embrace the questions more than the answers. Someone who tells me they know everything has actually told me they know nothing.