Hi, I’m Katie! Welcome to The Multiple Lives Theory. This is a space for anyone rewriting the rules of modern work, embracing a nonlinear career, and actively designing a life of creative freedom outside the standard 9-5 ladder.

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It’s July, and when I actually count up everything that’s happened this year, it moves fast. Properly fast.

• Went full-time freelance.

• Started building a new business, from nothing.

• Closed the other one down, quietly, with no announcement.

That’s six months. And I still sat down this week feeling like I hadn’t done enough, because none of it was on the list I wrote in January.

The problem with January

Here’s the thing about that list. January doesn’t actually know anything yet. You haven’t done anything by the first of the year. There’s nothing to measure. All that page can hold is intention, and intention is the cheapest thing any of us produce all year, no matter how good the pen is or how sure we feel writing it.

And yet we build the whole ritual there anyway. Word of the year, goals doc, vision board, whatever your version is. Then we spend the other eleven months being marked against a document written by someone running on hope and not much sleep.

July is different. Not because it’s a nicer month, but because it’s actually happened to you by now.

Six months in, day 186, not that I’m counting, except clearly I am. You know which commitments were real this year and which were just costume. You’ve met whoever quietly took over half your week without asking permission. You watched something you announced in February with total confidence just go quiet, and nobody noticed, least of all you.

Nobody does an audit in July though. Which is strange, because July is the first month all year that can actually answer you honestly.

The itinerary was never the point

Here’s the reframe I keep coming back to. There’s a difference between two words I used to think meant the same thing. Itinerary. Roster.

An itinerary is the plan you make before you’ve met the year. One traveller, one direction, on time or not. Every January list is an itinerary, really. So is a performance review. So is every “where do you see yourself in five years” answer you’ve ever given with a straight face.

A roster is asking something else completely. Not where you were supposed to be, but who actually turned up to do the living. If you’ve paid any attention at all to a non-linear year, you know it wasn’t only you carrying it. There’s the version of you who builds, the one who negotiates, the one who just answers the emails so nothing catches fire while everyone else is busy.

An itinerary only has room for one traveller. It has no way of noticing that three or four different people did the actual work, in shifts, and one of them worked serious unpaid overtime while another clocked off sometime in February and never really came back.

That’s the part January can’t see. Not because January is clueless, just because a roster can only be read afterwards. You can’t know in advance who’s going to show up to carry a year. You only find out later who did.

An itinerary can fall behind schedule. A roster can only be honest or dishonest about who’s tired. You can fail an itinerary completely and still have run a good roster, busy in exactly the right way, on completely the wrong document. And the version of you doing all the unpaid overtime doesn’t file a complaint, she just quietly stops showing up somewhere else in your life instead.

The five questions

One page. Once. Honestly, since honesty is doing most of the work in that sentence.

1. What did you add that you didn’t plan for?

Not what you achieved, what turned up uninvited. The client who came in sideways, through a conversation you nearly cancelled. The skill some deadline forced on you with no warning at all. Whatever you’ve found yourself reading about at midnight for reasons you couldn’t explain to anyone who actually pays you. Write these down first, because in a non-linear year the unplanned stuff is usually the real curriculum, and January never even knew it existed to ask about it.

2. What ended without telling you?

Non-linear lives don’t really do dramatic endings. The offer you haven’t mentioned since autumn. The five year plan you haven’t opened since March. The version of you who used to be good at industry drinks and hasn’t clocked in since some point in February. None of it resigned properly. It just stopped turning up one day, and you probably didn’t notice for a while. Name it anyway, because an ending you don’t name just keeps quietly charging you rent.

3. What are you still explaining that no longer needs explaining?

Listen to yourself next time it comes up at dinner. Somewhere in there is a defence running on pure momentum, protecting a decision nobody’s questioned in months. Mine happened a few weeks ago, mid sentence, defending my career to someone who hadn’t asked and clearly didn’t mind either way. We write these little speeches during the hard stretch and forget to check whether anyone’s still out there listening for them.

4. Which version of you actually did the work?

You already know it wasn’t one person running your last six months. There’s the builder, the negotiator, the one who just answers the emails so nothing catches fire. Which of them carried this half, and which one has basically been sitting in the break room since February. It isn’t really a character question, it’s a staffing one. If the emailer worked every single weekend while the builder sat the whole half out, that’s not something you fix with an earlier alarm. That’s a rostering problem, and you’re the one who wrote the roster, even if you didn’t know you were writing it at the time.

5. What would you not restart if it disappeared tomorrow?

Take this one last, and slowly. Everything you’re doing right now continues by default, contracts roll over, identities renew like a subscription you forgot you were paying for. But if it vanished overnight, and starting it again was a choice instead of an obligation, what would you leave on the ground? You don’t have to act on the answer today. You do have to know it.

My answers, since I’m asking for yours

I won’t lie, question five got me more than I expected it to.

There’s a piece of my work I would have called the sensible one right up until this week. The reliable strand. The one I mention at a family dinner when someone wants proof that any of this is going somewhere real. It’s a bit over a third of my income, which is not nothing, and which I’m starting to think is exactly the problem. Not the money itself. The fact I’ve been using it as evidence in an argument nobody in my family is actually making anymore.

If it vanished tomorrow I’d tell everyone it was a real blow. I’d make sure my face agreed with the story while I said it.

And quietly, underneath all that, I wouldn’t restart it.

I don’t know what to do with that yet. This was never going to hand me an action plan by Sunday, and I nearly wrote a tidier sentence here before admitting that would just be a lie dressed up as an ending. All it was ever really for was stopping me from walking into the second half of the year still holding a list some earlier version of me wrote in January, and pretending with a straight face that she knew what she was talking about.

The reset, not the resolution

So the January list stays where it is. I’m not deleting it. She meant well, and one true line out of five is a better record than most plans I’ve worked under.

But I haven’t written a new one. I don’t think this half of the year wants a list. It wants five honest answers folded into the notebook where the resolutions used to live, and someone willing to actually look at the year that happened, instead of the one that got announced on the first of it.

Whether that counts as being on track, I genuinely don’t know. I think it was always the wrong question. Nobody puts “who did the roster” on a January page. There’s no box for it.

Maybe there should be.

What’s your answer to question five, the thing you wouldn’t restart if it vanished tomorrow? Reply and tell me. I read every one.

If this one landed, these go deeper:

→ You’ve been measuring yourself on the wrong clock

→ You don’t pivot. You add.

New here? Multiple Lives Theory is a weekly essay on nonlinear careers, reinvention and the emotional reality of changing your life. Sundays and Thursdays.

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New here?

Multiple Lives Theory is a weekly essay on nonlinear careers, reinvention and the emotional reality of changing your life. Sundays and Thursdays.

At some point in my mid-twenties I sent a CV to a job I genuinely wanted. Two pages, properly formatted, and it contained almost no useful information about me. It had my degree, my titles in reverse chronological order, and a skills section with words like “cross-functional collaboration” that could have sat on any CV in any industry. It accurately described the jobs I’d had. It said nothing about the person who’d had them. I didn’t get the job — and I’ve thought about that document ever since, not with regret but with a kind of fascinated irritation at the format.

This isn’t a failure of self-presentation

It’s what CVs are for. The format was designed in an era when careers were linear and the relevant information was simple: where have you been, and for how long. That maps neatly to a chronological list. It still works extremely well if your career is a clean climb up one ladder in one industry. For anyone whose path looks like anything else — multi-disciplinary, interrupted, lateral, industry-jumping — the format actively works against you. Not because you lack things to show, but because the things you have don’t fit the available fields.

A sequence vs a pattern

A CV can only carry a sequence — titles and dates in order.

But your real value is a pattern — the throughline that runs underneath the sequence. And a sequence that was actually a pattern looks, from the outside, like a series of disconnected moves.

The three things a CV can’t hold

Across several versions of my own working life, I keep finding the same three:

1. Translation. When I moved from chemistry research into web development, I brought precision under ambiguity, the ability to hold many variables at once, and the tolerance to run an experiment that returns a null result and read it as data, not failure. The CV said “BSc (Advanced Chemistry), 2015” and listed dev roles as if the science were just context, rather than the foundation of how I approached every problem since.

2. Pattern. Most nonlinear careers have a coherent internal logic — mine was a steady move toward the intersection of systems thinking and communication. A CV can’t carry a pattern. It can only carry a list.

3. Judgement. Knowing which meeting to push back in, when the brief is asking the wrong question, how to read a room or a dataset. Judgement has no field on the form. It lives in the gap between the bullet points.

The document that tells the truth

I’m not saying abolish CVs — they’re a filtering mechanism and filters exist for a reason. But there’s a cost to letting the format become the way you understand your own history: you start to see your career through its limitations, and the gaps and pivots start to look like the story rather than the thread running through them. What’s helped me, and the people I’ve talked to about this, is keeping a second document alongside the CV. Not a replacement — a translation document.

• What did I actually learn here?

• What capability did I build that has no official name?

• What did I carry forward that never showed up in a job description?

I wrote my own about eighteen months ago, in the gap between my last corporate role and the first time I had to describe myself to a client as a freelancer. It was the first time I’d looked at my history as something other than a series of justifications for my current position — and I found things in it I’d been carrying for a decade without noticing. Your CV is lying about you. Not maliciously — it just wasn’t built to tell the truth about work that can’t be reduced to a title and a date range. The good news is you can tell it yourself. You just have to do it in a different format.

— Katie

What’s the capability you’ve built that has no official name — the thing you do that never shows up on a CV but has been the most consistently useful thing about you?

Reply and tell me, I read every one.

More from Multiple Lives Theory:

→ the multi-passionate person’s guide to answering “what do you do” — on describing a life that doesn’t fit one title

→ what happens to your identity when you remove the job title — on who you are without the shorthand

New here?

Multiple Lives Theory is a weekly essay on nonlinear careers, reinvention and the emotional reality of changing your life. Sundays and Thursdays.

Subscribe now

Hi, I’m Katie! Welcome to The Multiple Lives Theory. This is a space for anyone rewriting the rules of modern work, embracing a nonlinear career, and actively designing a life of creative freedom outside the standard 9-5 ladder.

Subscribe now

You’re not behind. You’re using the wrong clock.

There’s a specific anxiety that arrives on a Tuesday afternoon when you see that someone you went to school with has just been made partner. Not because you want their job — you don’t, you know exactly what that job costs and it isn’t the life you’re building. It’s something quieter and more disorienting than envy. It’s the gut-level sense that you’re running a different race and you’ve somehow already fallen behind in it.

The feeling that isn’t envy

I spent a long time trying to name that feeling. It wasn’t jealousy. It wasn’t regret. It was closer to the feeling of having used the wrong measuring tape all morning — where everything you’ve measured is, technically, incorrect. The numbers are real. They’re just answers to the wrong question.

The borrowed clock vs your actual clock

The borrowed clock measures you against a sequence you didn’t choose: finish school, get a degree, get a job, get a better job, buy somewhere, get promoted. It arrived pre-installed, ambient, the background hum of every family dinner and reunion. Your actual clock measures you against a direction — the thing you’re actually moving toward, which has its own pace and its own markers.

When you hold the borrowed clock against a life it was never built for, three things happen:

• You always read as behind — not because you’re slow, but because you’re using the wrong instrument.

• A quiet month feels like falling back and a good month feels like merely catching up.

• You stop trusting what you can see, because the borrowed clock is loud and your real progress is quiet.

Where the borrowed clock came from

Nobody chose these milestones; they were never announced. The sequence is a fine sequence — for the people it fits, it works extremely well. The problem only starts when you’ve left the track deliberately, or been pushed off it, and you keep checking your progress against the markers of the path you’re no longer on. I left my last corporate role at thirty-two. By the borrowed clock, thirty-two should have been a consolidation year — deepening a specialism, moving into a bigger place. Instead I had a redundancy, a terrifying gap in income, and a timeline that was entirely my own invention.

Why it’s so persistent

The borrowed clock doesn’t disappear just because you’ve intellectually rejected it. It has enormous external reinforcement — the LinkedIn updates, the reunion questions, the family check-ins that are always, somehow, about the things on the original sequence rather than the things on yours. Your actual clock is mostly invisible to other people, which means you’re the only one maintaining it. And when you’re the only one who can see your progress, it gets very easy to stop believing in it.

It’s a clock problem, not a comparison problem

This is why “just compare yourself less” never worked for me. Comparison is the symptom. The root is the borrowed timeline. Nonlinear paths don’t have legible early milestones — no promotion, no salary band, no property. They have things like: started writing publicly, sent the first real pitch, had the first month that felt less like survival and more like building. Those are real milestones. They just don’t fit in a LinkedIn headline, so they can feel like nothing even as they’re happening.

How to reset the clock

I’m still working this out, but here’s what’s helped:

1. Name your actual milestones, even the ones that sound embarrassingly small. Write them down. They’re what’s accumulating.

2. Measure against direction, not sequence. The borrowed clock measures against a ladder; yours measures against where you’re actually headed.

3. Collect the evidence deliberately. Direction-evidence is messier than a promotion and doesn’t come with a notification. You have to log it yourself.

4. Expect the borrowed clock to keep showing up. It won’t vanish. Mine hasn’t.

5. Shorten the response time. The win isn’t never feeling behind — it’s catching the wrong instrument faster and putting it down.

Where I’ve landed

I still have the occasional Tuesday where someone’s update reaches me before my better judgement does. But I can feel the moment the wrong instrument comes out now, and I can put it down faster. The interval between the comparison and the correction keeps getting shorter, and that turns out to be most of the work. Your progress is real. It’s just not legible on someone else’s timeline — and it was never supposed to be.

— Katie

What’s a milestone you’ve hit recently that would never make a LinkedIn post but actually mattered? Reply and tell me — I read every one.

More from Multiple Lives Theory:

→ you don’t pivot. you add. — on reinvention as accumulation, not erasure

→ the reinvention story we’re not telling — on drift, luck and the narrative we install afterwards

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I kept a list. Not a literal one — I’m not that organised under pressure — but a mental tally. The manager who dismissed an idea in front of a room. The meeting that existed only to have the meeting. The performance review that was technically accurate and completely missed the point of what I was trying to do.

The Tuesday afternoon I sat in an open-plan office with my headphones in and felt something close to grief.

I had a lot of signs.

Everyone has signs

Most people who’ve been in the wrong job for a while have a lot of signs. The thing is, the signs are almost never the problem. They’re information about the conditions of the job, not about you.

Signs can be improved. A different manager, a restructure, a secondment, a salary review — any of them can resolve a sign. You can wait them out, fix them, report them, or absorb them. Which is exactly why they kept me there so long.

And signs are seductive precisely because each one comes with an action attached — a conversation to request, a case to build, a boundary to hold.

Doing something feels like progress. Mostly it isn’t. It’s motion inside a building you’ve already half-left, and the motion is what convinces you you’re still trying.

A sign vs a signal

A sign is external and fixable. It happens to you, and it points at the conditions.

A signal is internal and it doesn’t care about the conditions at all.

It’s the moment you stop trying to solve the problem from inside the building — not because you’ve run out of solutions, but because you’ve quietly stopped caring whether they work.

The distinction matters because of what each one does to you:

• Signs always give you something to do — another case to build, another conversation to have — so they keep you busy inside the building for months, sometimes years.

• The signal gives you nothing to do. It just changes the question from “how do I make this better” to “what am I actually doing here.”

• Signs can be fixed. The signal can’t. No restructure reaches it.

When my signal arrived

I can tell you almost exactly when mine came. It was a quarterly review that was, objectively, fine. Good things were said. I got what you’d call a positive outcome. And I sat there feeling — not bored, not angry, not disappointed.

Just completely elsewhere, as if the part of me that used to live in those rooms had filed a change of address and not told me. I took the metro home and thought: I’m not interested in fixing this anymore. Not “I can’t.” Not “I’ve tried.”

Just — the fixing impulse was gone.

I’d had bad days before. Everyone has bad days, and a bad day still argues — it builds a case, it wants the situation to change. This wasn’t that. There was nothing to argue with. The case had simply closed while I wasn’t looking, and what was left wasn’t frustration. It was quiet.

How to tell a signal from a sign

From my own experience, and from the many people I’ve since heard describe their version of it, the signal has a few tells:

1. It’s indifference, not anger. Anger still cares about the outcome. Indifference has stopped.

2. It arrives when you stop arguing. You stop rehearsing what you’d say if given the chance to say it.

3. It’s stable. It doesn’t lift after a holiday or a project change. Mine never did.

4. It changes the question. From “how do I fix this?” to “do I still want this fixed?”

5. It shows up even when nothing’s wrong. Mine arrived in a meeting that went well. That’s the real giveaway — a sign needs a grievance to point at; the signal doesn’t need anything to be wrong at all.

Why naming it matters

I got my signal roughly eight months before I actually left, and those months weren’t wasted — I was saving, building, testing. But I spent a lot of them solving for the wrong variable, renegotiating conditions that were never the real issue. The day I named the signal was the day I stopped spending energy on the building and started spending it on what came next. That reallocation was everything.

I’m not telling you to walk out the moment it lands. Most of us can’t, and rushing it rarely ends well. But there’s a real cost to mistaking a signal for a sign: you keep renegotiating terms that were never the problem, and the months stack up while you do. Naming it doesn’t force your hand. It just stops you solving the wrong equation. I’m still learning to hear it faster, and I’m not sure you can rush that part. But you can at least ask the better question earlier: am I trying to fix the conditions, or have I stopped caring whether they’re fixed? The answer tells you where you actually are.

— Katie

Reply and tell me: was there a specific moment when you knew — not a list of reasons, but a feeling that the door had already closed? I love hearing different perspectives and I read every one.

More from Multiple Lives Theory:

→ the relief you’re not allowed to feel when the job ends — on the feeling nobody prepares you for

→ what happens to your identity when you remove the job title — on who you are when the title goes

New here?

Multiple Lives Theory is a weekly essay on nonlinear careers, reinvention and the emotional reality of changing your life.

Subscribe now

Hi, I’m Katie! Welcome to The Multiple Lives Theory. This is a space for anyone rewriting the rules of modern work, embracing a nonlinear career, and actively designing a life of creative freedom outside the standard 9-5 ladder.

Subscribe now

It was never a brave jump.

I’ve told the other version — the brave one — maybe thirty times. At dinners, on calls, once to a woman who put her hand on her chest and said “good for you.” It has a turning point and a protagonist and people lean in. And every single time, a small part of me stands slightly behind myself, going: that’s not what happened.

What happened was drift. That’s the story I don’t tell. I’ve come to think it’s the only useful one.

The story that performs well

In the version that lands, I saw clearly that the corporate path wasn’t mine, made a courageous decision, and walked out into a new life. Clean arc. Clear cause. People love it because it’s legible — it tells them reinvention is a thing brave people simply decide to do.

I’ve performed it so many times I can deliver it on autopilot. The autopilot is the tell. You don’t go on autopilot about the things that actually happened to you. You go on autopilot about the script.

What actually happened

I drifted into web development because a job was going and I needed the money. I ended up in health tech because a recruiter messaged me on a Tuesday and I was bored enough to answer. Half of my “reinventions” started as somebody else’s suggestion. The leaving itself — the big brave jump — was less a decision than a slow accumulation of Sunday nights, until one Monday the maths finally tipped.

Then, afterwards, I went back and installed a narrative. Memory is a generous editor. It deletes the drift, promotes the agency, and hands you back a story where you were driving the whole time.

Two ways to tell it: the decision myth vs the drift

There are two ways to tell every reinvention, and we almost always reach for the wrong one.

The decision myth says: first you get clarity, then you find courage, then you make a clean break. Understanding causes the move. It’s the LinkedIn version, the dinner version, the one with a protagonist at the centre of it.

The drift says: first you move — nudged, bored, broke, or pushed — and the understanding arrives later, if it arrives at all. Movement comes first. The meaning gets retrofitted.

The difference isn’t cosmetic. Which story you believe quietly changes what you do:

• If you believe the decision myth, you wait for clarity before you move — and the clarity mostly arrives after.

• You read your own fog as evidence you’re not ready, when it’s really just evidence you’re being honest.

• You edit the luck and the help out of the story, and hand people a superhero they can’t learn anything from.

Why we install the clean story

The obvious answer is that it’s useful. It’s useful at dinners. It’s useful on LinkedIn, where every career change has to be reframed as strategy within forty-eight hours of it happening. Nobody posts “I fell into this sideways and I’m still not sure it was a choice.” The algorithm wouldn’t know what to do with it. Neither would your aunt.

So we tidy. We delete the boredom and the rent and the recruiter, and we promote the one brave-sounding sentence to the front. Over enough retellings, we start to believe the tidy version ourselves.

Who the clean story fails

The polished version has a cost, and the cost lands on whoever’s listening.

Because somewhere out there is a person standing in their kitchen at 11pm, googling whether it’s too late to change everything, and the only stories they can find are the cinematic ones. Saw clearly. Decided bravely. Executed the plan. They look at their own situation — the fog, the half-reasons, the absence of any clear signal — and they conclude they must not be ready. They think the real reinventors knew. The real reinventors just felt tired.

The prerequisite isn’t clarity

I know exactly when the gap between my two stories stopped being abstract. I’d kept journals through the year I was deciding — not deciding, exactly; circling. I found them in a box when we moved, and I sat on the floor of a half-packed flat and read a year of my own handwriting. I’d expected a person working towards something. What I found was a person pacing a room: the same three worries, rewritten forty different ways, no insight building towards a decision. Just weather.

The clarity I’d described at thirty dinners as the cause of the leap had actually turned up about eight months after it. Which means the prerequisite for changing your life was never clarity. It was a willingness to move while confused, and to let the reasons assemble themselves later.

The reinvention story we keep telling has the arrow backwards.

We say: I understood, so I moved. Mostly it’s: I moved, and then slowly, I understood.

What the honest version actually looks like

If the drift is the real mechanism, then here’s what reinvention actually asks of you — none of it photogenic, all of it more doable than the brave version.

1. You move before you’re sure. Not recklessly. Just earlier than the decision myth permits — while the reasons are still half-formed.

2. You let the reasons assemble later. The coherence is real, but it’s built in hindsight. Stop demanding it up front.

3. You count the help. The recruiter who messaged on a boring Tuesday. The redundancy that made the call for someone so they didn’t have to. In my case, about seven months of savings that turned a terrifying leap into a survivable one. Strip the luck out and what’s left is a superhero — useless to everyone watching.

4. You stop waiting to feel like the protagonist. That feeling mostly exists in the retelling. If you wait for it, you wait forever.

5. You tell it straight. Drift, accident, nudge and all — because the next person in the kitchen at 11pm needs the true version, not the brave one.

Telling it the way it went

I won’t lie, I liked being the superhero version of me. Letting go of her stings a little. But I’ve drifted, accumulated, got lucky, got nudged, ran out of tolerance before I ran out of fear, and moved anyway — and the story only became a story afterwards.

If you’re in the fog right now, waiting to feel like the protagonist before you let yourself move, you might be waiting for a feeling that only arrives in the edit. The drift is the path. Nobody tells it that way, that’s all.

And this time I’m telling it the way it actually went — for the person in the kitchen at 11pm, reading hero stories and concluding the wrong thing about themselves.

She doesn’t need a hero. She needs a witness.

— Katie

What’s the version of your reinvention story that doesn’t make it into the caption — the drift, the lucky accident, the nudge you’ve edited out?

Hit reply and tell me. I read every one, and the answers so far are better than the essays.

Leave a comment

More from Multiple Lives Theory:

→ the clarity trap — on waiting to feel sure before you let yourself move

→ you don’t pivot. you add. — on reinvention as accumulation, not erasure

The face that says this is a blow but I’m a professional and I’ll be fine — and I held it through the meeting, through the corridor, through the lift, all the way to the train home.

Then I sat at the station for a bit, and felt something I still haven’t fully admitted to anyone.

Relief.

Not the whole of it. There was real loss in there too, the kind that takes months to surface properly. But underneath the loss, quiet and a little ashamed of itself, was the distinct sensation of a held breath finally going out. Something I’d been carrying without noticing had been taken off me, and my first honest reaction wasn’t grief. It was lighter than that.

You’re not supposed to feel that. There’s a script for losing your job and relief isn’t in it.

The script is shock, then anger, then the brave rebuild — and people are ready to meet you at any of those stations. That’s awful. Their loss. You’ll land on your feet.

What nobody hands you a line for is the version where some part of you has been waiting to be released and didn’t have the nerve to do it itself.

So you sit on it. You let everyone assume the obvious thing, because the obvious thing is easier to receive condolences for.

The thing is, the relief didn’t arrive out of nowhere.

It had been accumulating for a long time — in the meetings I stopped preparing for properly, in the inbox I’d let sit on a Monday morning because I couldn’t manufacture enough care to open it, in the ideas I’d stopped pitching because the energy required to advocate for them in that particular room had become more than they felt worth. I’d been quietly managing down my own investment for months. Not dramatically, not with any announced decision. Just the slow, incremental way that caring about something becomes effortful before it becomes impossible. You start conserving. Not consciously. You just stop spending the discretionary attention.

I used to be good at that job. I want to be clear about that, because it matters. There was a version of me, not long before the end, who genuinely believed in what we were building and brought her whole brain to it. The disengagement wasn’t laziness and it wasn’t incompetence. It was something more like a slow incompatibility — the kind that develops quietly, without announcement, between a person and the specific shape a role has taken over time.

The grief, when it came, was real but also partly performed — and I knew the difference even at the time.

The grief was real at the level of identity: I’d had a title, a clear answer to ‘what do you do,’ a professional context that located me in the world. Losing that costs something genuine. But the grief I offered at dinners — the careful version, the one that said I’m processing this but I’ll be fine — was also doing a social job.

It gave people somewhere to stand. It made the situation legible.

What I didn’t offer, at those dinners, was the other thing. The fact that the Tuesday after I left, I woke up and felt — not anxious, not bereft, not in any of the ways the script said I should be. Just quiet. The specific quiet of something that had been switched off.

I think the relief is information, though.

I think it’s the most honest thing that happens in the whole episode, precisely because you didn’t choose it and can’t dress it up. The grief I performed at dinners was partly real and partly the expected costume. The relief in the car park was just true. It arrived before I could decide what it should be.

And what it was telling me, if I’d been willing to listen sooner, was that I’d already left.

Months ago.

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I’d been turning up to a role I’d quietly resigned from in every way except the one that shows on paper. The redundancy didn’t end the job. It made official a departure that had already happened somewhere I wasn’t looking.

That’s the part that unsettles me still. Not that I felt relieved — but that the relief meant I’d known, and had been waiting for someone else to make the call so I wouldn’t have to. So I could keep the clean story. Pushed, not jumped. No need to explain myself to my parents, the mortgage, the version of me that takes a quiet pride in being sensible.

There’s a strange dignity we attach to being made to leave, versus choosing to. One is something that happened to you. The other is something you have to own. I reached for the first because it cost me less.

And I think a lot of people make the same calculation, often without realising.

The redundancy, the restructure, the contract ending — these are real events with real weight, and I’m not dismissing that. But sometimes they also function as permission.

Permission to feel what you were already feeling. To stop what you’d already stopped wanting. To move in the direction you’d been quietly facing for months. The external event gives you cover. You don’t have to frame it as a choice because, technically, it wasn’t entirely. And yet the relief tells a different story.

I won’t lie, I still don’t have a tidy way to hold all of it.

The loss was real.

The relief was real.

They didn’t take turns — they showed up together.

Maybe that’s just what an ending is, when the thing ending had stopped fitting a while ago. Not one feeling, but two, sitting awkwardly next to each other, both telling the truth.

I’m still learning to let the relief speak first sometimes.

— Katie xx

If you’ve read the whole post, reply and tell me: have you ever felt relief you weren’t allowed to say out loud — about a job, a role, an ending? I read every one.

Hi, I’m Katie! Welcome to The Multiple Lives Theory. This is a space for anyone rewriting the rules of modern work, embracing a nonlinear career, and actively designing a life of creative freedom outside the standard 9-5 ladder.

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For years I treated “so what do you do” as a test I kept failing.

Someone would ask it — at a party, in a taxi, across a table — and I’d feel my brain start sorting.

Which version do I give this person?

The one that sounds impressive. The one that’s true. The one that won’t open follow-up questions I can’t close cleanly. By the time I’d chosen, the pause had run a half-second too long, and the pause itself became the answer. She doesn’t know what she does.

If you’re multi-passionate — if you do a few things that don’t obviously belong in the same sentence — you know this exact pause. And you’ve probably been told the fix is to get clearer. Pick the headline. Lead with the impressive one.

I don’t think that’s the fix. I think that’s just niching down in a friendlier outfit.

Here’s what I’ve landed on instead, after a long run of bad answers.

Stop trying to be legible in one sentence.

The one-sentence answer is built for the asker’s convenience, not your accuracy.

When you compress three real things into one tidy phrase, you’re not communicating better — you’re translating yourself into a language that loses the point. The honest answer takes two sentences. Let it take two.

Then notice what the question is actually asking. Most of the time “what do you do” isn’t a request for your org chart.

It’s a person reaching for a handle to hold you by. They want somewhere to start.

Which means you don’t owe them completeness — you owe them a door. Give them the most interesting true thing, not the most senior one.

“I write about why people change careers” opens a better conversation than a job title ever did, and it’s more accurate to who I am than the title ever was.

And the one that actually changed it for me: answer with the through-line, not the list.

For a long time I answered by listing. I do this, and also this, and also this.

It sounds scattered because a list is scattered. But underneath my list there’s a thread — I’m interested in how people hold more than one identity at once — and when I answer with the thread, the same three things suddenly sound like one person instead of a committee.

The list makes you sound like you haven’t decided. The thread makes you sound like you’ve noticed something.

I won’t pretend I’ve perfected this. Last week someone asked me at a dinner and I still fumbled it, led with the boring version, watched their eyes do the polite glaze. The pause still happens. The old reflex to apologise for not fitting still shows up on cue.

But I’ve stopped believing the pause means something’s wrong with me. The pause is just the sound of a person who doesn’t round herself down on command.

The clean answer was never the goal. The goal is to stop flinching at the question.

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There’s a box on every form that asks for your occupation, and for eight years I never thought about it once.

Doctor’s intake. Visa application. The little card they hand you on the plane. Occupation. I’d write the title without slowing down, the same way you write your own name, because that’s what it had become — a fact about me as plain as my date of birth. APAC web lead. Three words that answered a question I didn’t know was a question.

Then I left, and a few months later I was filling out a form, and I got to the box, and I stopped.

I genuinely didn’t know what to put.

It’s a small thing. It’s a box on a form. But I sat there with the pen not moving and felt something I wasn’t braced for, which was that I had taken the title off and found, underneath it, not freedom but a blank.

Here’s what I understand now that I couldn’t see from inside it.

The title wasn’t describing my work. It was lending me an identity I could borrow without having to build one myself.

When someone asked what I did, I had an answer that did several jobs at once.

It told them where I sat in a hierarchy. It told them I was competent, that people relied on me, that I was the kind of person who got things across the line.

It quietly answered “are you doing okay” and “are you worth talking to at this party” and “have you made something of yourself” — all of it, in three words, without me ever having to feel the answer.

The title was a pre-written statement I could hand over instead of myself.

And then it was gone, and people still asked the question, and I had to stand in the gap where the answer used to be.

I used to think the hard part of leaving would be the money, or the structure, or the loss of the work itself. Those are real. I’m not going to pretend the absence of a salary is a spiritual experience; mostly it’s just stressful.

But that’s not what stopped me at the form.

What stopped me was realising how much of my sense of myself had been outsourced.

The title did the believing for me. As long as I had it, I never had to ask whether I mattered, because the answer was external and it renewed itself every morning the second I opened my inbox and found that people still needed me. Being needed was the proof. The title was the receipt.

Take it away and the question comes back. The one underneath. Am I worth something when nobody is requiring me to be?

I expected the first weeks without a job to feel like relief, and some of it did. But mostly what I noticed was the silence. Not the quiet of rest. The quiet of a room where the thing that used to tell you who you were has stopped talking.

I’d reach for my phone at 8am out of a muscle memory that no longer had anything on the other end of it.

No standup.

No one waiting.

The day didn’t tell me what I was for. I had to.

And I found out something uncomfortable, which is that I’d built almost nothing on the inside that wasn’t propped up by the structure on the outside. I’d been so busy being useful that I’d never checked whether there was a version of me that existed when I wasn’t.

There’s a book I keep going back to, Working Identity by Herminia Ibarra, and the idea that’s stayed with me is that we don’t think our way into a new identity. We act our way into it. You don’t sit in a room and figure out who you are now and then go and live it. You do small things, badly, and slowly a self accumulates around the doing.

So that’s what Ive been doing. Building the e-commerce brand. Writing this. Taking on work that doesn’t come with a title I can write in the box. And the strange thing is that none of it has produced a clean three-word answer. I still don’t know what to put.

But the not-knowing has changed texture. It used to feel like absence. Now it feels closer to room.

I think the title was never the real problem. The problem was that I let it answer a question it was never qualified to answer. What do you do is not the same as who are you, and for eight years I let one stand in for the other because it was easier, and because everyone around me was making the same trade.

I filled in the box eventually. I wrote something vague and a little untrue and moved on, because forms don’t leave space for the real answer and the queue behind me was long.

But I’ve started to think the real answer isn’t a noun at all. It’s not a better title waiting to be found and written in the box. It might just be the willingness to stand in the gap and not reach for something to borrow.

I’m not all the way there. Some mornings I still want the receipt. I still want someone to need me by 9am so I don’t have to decide for myself whether I count.

But I’m getting slightly better at the silence. At letting the question sit there, unanswered, mine.

That’s not nothing. Some days it’s almost everything.

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I was at a dinner a few weeks ago, the kind where everyone goes around the table explaining what they do, and a woman two seats down described her career using the word “pivot” three times in under two minutes.

She pivoted out of law. Then she pivoted into design. Then, she said, she was “pivoting again,” and she laughed a little when she said it, the way you laugh at something slightly embarrassing about yourself.

I watched her get smaller each time. Not physically. Just the apology underneath it. Each move framed as a correction. As if the last thing had been a wrong turn she was now setting right.

And I recognised it, because I’ve done exactly the same thing.

I used to introduce my own history as a series of departures. I left medical research. I left chemistry. I left a perfectly good career in web development to go into health tech, and then I left that too. Said out loud, it sounds like a person who can’t commit. Like someone wandering through rooms, turning the lights off behind her.

That’s what the word does. Pivot implies subtraction. It says there was a thing, and then I stopped doing the thing, and now there’s a different thing. Each step quietly erases the one before it.

But that’s not what happened. That’s not what happens to anyone.

Here’s the part nobody corrected for me, so Ill say it plainly. The lab didn’t disappear when I stopped standing in one. The eight years of managing briefs and shipping things on time didn’t get deleted when I handed back the title. The chemistry is still in how I break a problem apart. The research is still in how I read a situation before I move inside it.

Every version of me is still in the room. They didn’t leave. I just stopped introducing them.

You don’t pivot. You add.

I understand why the language exists. “Pivot” is a clean word. It’s efficient. It lets you skip the long story in the exact places nobody wants the long story — the dinner, the LinkedIn headline, the bio that has to fit in a sentence. And for a basketball player, for a startup, pivot is accurate. You plant one foot and swing the rest of you somewhere new. Something genuinely gets left behind.

But a person is not a startup. A career is not a single product hunting for a market. When you say you pivoted, you’re borrowing a word built for things that can only be one thing at a time, and pressing it onto a person who is, by definition, accumulating.

The startup pivots because it can’t afford to run two products at once. You are not running out of yourself. You don’t have a burn rate on your own past.

I think the reason this matters isn’t strategic. It’s not really about how you present yourself, although that shifts too. It’s about what you believe actually happened to you.

If you believe you started over — four times, five times, however many — then you believe you’re permanently behind. You’re always the beginner. You’re always the one who threw away a head start. The maths never lands in your favour, because every reset drops you back to zero and the clock keeps running.

But if every version is still in the room, the maths is a different equation entirely.

Then the career that looked like a zigzag from the outside was compounding the whole time. The research taught me how to sit inside not knowing.

The web development taught me how to build a thing and ship it before it was perfect. The health tech years taught me how people actually behave when a system they trusted stops working for them. None of that is gone. It’s deposited.

What if the zigzag was never the story? What if the deposits were?

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I want to be careful here, because there’s a version of this that hardens into a slogan, and I don’t trust slogans about my own life. There were moves I made out of fear and called growth. There were jobs I left because I was bored and jobs I left because I was breaking, and from the outside they looked identical, and I’m still not always sure which was which. Addition isn’t automatically wise. You can accumulate the wrong things. You can layer and layer and end up heavier instead of deeper.

So I’m not telling you every turn was secretly brilliant. Im telling you the frame of erasure was wrong even when the decisions were.

The woman at the dinner asked me, near the end, what I did. And I felt myself reach for the short version, the clean one, the one that drops three of the four lives because they don’t fit the sentence.

I didn’t, in the end. I said something closer to the truth. I said I’d done a few different things and they were starting to make sense to me as one thing, even if I couldn’t name the through-line yet. She looked at me for a second like that was allowed. Like it hadn’t occurred to her you could just… not apologise.

I don’t know if she believed me. I’m not sure I fully believe it on the harder days — the ones where the bank balance is arguing with the philosophy, and the philosophy is losing.

But I’ve stopped using the word pivot. That part I’m sure about. Not because I’ve found a better word yet, but because I’ve finally caught what the old one was doing. Making me smaller. Asking me to excuse a history that was never a mistake.

Every version is still here. I’m not starting over.

I’m just adding to the pile, and waiting to see the shape.

— Katie xx

Hi, I’m Katie! Welcome to The Multiple Lives Theory. This is a space for anyone rewriting the rules of modern work, embracing a nonlinear career, and actively designing a life of creative freedom outside the standard 9-5 ladder.

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There is an entire industry built on telling people to get clear.

Books about it. Frameworks for it. Podcasts. Palm readers. Coaches who specialise in guiding you through it. The advice comes from a good place — from the genuine observation that most people stay stuck because they can’t commit to a direction. That the problem is indecision, and the solution is the deliberate act of eliminating options until one remains.

And that’s right. For a certain kind of person, in a certain kind of stuck.

It’s just not the only kind of stuck.

There’s another kind. The one that gets mistaken for the first. The person sitting with three things that all make genuine sense — three directions, three versions of a life they could actually build, three answers to the question of what they should be doing — and the problem is not that they’re confused. The problem is that they’re not. All three are real. All three fit. And none of them, looked at directly, is obviously the one.

For that person, “get clarity” is the worst possible advice.

Because it implies the solution is to eliminate. To narrow. To sit with the options until one rises and the others fall away. And for the person I’m describing, that sitting doesn’t produce clarity. It produces a kind of low-grade anxiety that looks, from the outside, like avoidance. A feeling that something must be wrong with them — that a resolved person would have figured this out by now.

I know this feeling. I subscribed to the clarity framework for years. I made lists. I used the templates. I sat with the question and waited for the answer to arrive in the form everyone described — a kind of settling, a sense of rightness, a knowing.

It didn’t come. Or it came and immediately argued with itself.

I thought this meant I hadn’t done the work properly. That I wasn’t looking honestly enough, or bravely enough, or that I was protecting something I needed to let go of. So I tried harder. More lists. More journalling. More conversations with coaches who were very patient and very good and who, bless them, could not help me.

Because I wasn’t confused.

I had three real answers. And the clarity framework had no interface for that.

Here’s what I think is actually true — and it took longer than I’d like to admit to understand. Clarity isn’t a prerequisite for starting. It’s what starting produces. The people who have arrived somewhere clear — who can say, without rehearsal, what they do and why — they didn’t get there by sitting and deciding. They got there by moving. By trying the first real thing and letting it generate information. By discovering, through action, what they needed to know about themselves that thinking couldn’t give them.

The clarity framework inverts this. It asks you to know before you go.

And for the person with three real answers, that sequence is a trap. Because none of the three will reveal itself as the clear winner in the abstract. They have to be tested. Tried. Made. Taken somewhere and confronted with reality. And what you’ll find, when you do, is not that one answer was right all along — but that the experience of choosing one tells you things the other two couldn’t.

The advice assumes the problem is confusion. It doesn’t account for the person who simply has three real answers and needs to start, imperfectly, with one.

This is the part that helps me now, when I feel the familiar pull towards more deliberation. I ask myself: is this confusion, or is this just the discomfort of moving without complete certainty. Because those are different feelings. Confusion has a texture of not-knowing. What I’m usually dealing with is a texture of not-yet-knowing — which is another thing entirely.

You don’t need to be clear to begin. You need to begin in order to become clear.

Pick the realest of the three real things and take one small action towards it. Not a commitment. An experiment. Something that will generate information you don’t have yet.

The clarity will follow.

It always does. Just not in the order the framework promised.

What’s the version of clarity nobody gave you a map for? I’m genuinely curious what the answer looks like from where you’re sitting.

Someone asks what you do. You open your mouth. The old answer — the one with the job title and the company name and the clean, upward line — isn’t quite true anymore. And the new answer isn’t a sentence yet. It’s a theory. An accumulation. Something that requires a paragraph and a glass of wine and a listener who isn’t in a hurry.

Most people smile and say something approximate. Something that fits. Something that’s acceptable.

I did this for years. I gave people the version of my career that would land quickly and cause no confusion. I left out the parts that didn’t connect or make sense.

I apologised, in advance, for anything that seemed to require explanation. I called things pivots and transitions, as if the word would smooth over the fact that I’d been three different people professionally and wasn’t entirely done yet.

Here’s what I think was actually happening. I was trying to explain a nonlinear career in a linear vocabulary.

And that will always fail. Not because the career is confusing, but because the grammar is wrong.

The vocabulary we inherited for careers — the ladder, the track, the path, the promotion, the next step — assumes direction is singular. One thing leads to another in a sequence that can be read forwards and backwards without ambiguity. Promotion. Specialisation. Seniority. The career that makes sense and impressive in two words at a dinner party.

A nonlinear career has a different structure. It accumulates rather than ascends. Each version of you isn’t a detour from the main path — it’s a deposit. The work you did in one place is still running in the background of everything that comes after. The skills, the knowledge, the way you think, the experience, the perspective — they all compound. They don’t disappear when the job title changes.

The problem is that compounding doesn’t photograph well. You can’t put it in a LinkedIn headline.

So you can’t help but feel that you have to explain. And in the explaining, you preface, you apologise, or you have to back yourself up so many times. You call things mistakes or ‘trying’ it before anyone has implied they are. You use the word unconventional as a buffer. You make it smaller than it is to fit the container someone else has handed you.

I won’t lie, overtime I was personally draining myself from always making others comfortable, or anticipating the reaction they’ll have once they hear something unconventional or perhaps even unfamiliar in their world. Then one day I decided on a specific moment to stop doing this. Not a dramatic decision. More of it was not worth the energy economics. So on another day when someone asked and I decided to give them the full answer. The whole thing, without the buffer — just owning it.

And they were pleasantly interested. More interested, maybe, than they would have been in the clean version.

The nonlinear career isn’t confusing. You’ve just been using the wrong vocabulary for it. The right vocabulary sounds less like an apology and more like an argument. It knows that the gaps were when you were figuring something out. That the change of direction was directional, actually — just not in the way the original plan anticipated. That doing three things is not the same as doing none of them well.

When you stopped apologizing for the gaps, the gaps became the story.

And the story is more interesting than the straight line.

I’m still working on saying it quickly and owning it. Still editing it down to something that fits a conversation. But I’ve stopped treating the career itself as the thing that needs fixing.

The vocabulary needed fixing. Not the years.

If you’ve ever pre-apologised for your career before anyone asked — I want to hear what your actual story sounds like. Reply here.

Hi, I’m Katie! Welcome to The Multiple Lives Theory. This is a space for anyone rewriting the rules of modern work, embracing a nonlinear career, and actively designing a life of creative freedom outside the standard 9-5 ladder.

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The question came up at a dinner a few months ago. Someone asked how I’d ended up doing what I do, and I heard myself begin to answer.

I gave the version I always give. The one that starts with design and moves through web design, naturally towards UX and lands neatly on freelance, as if the whole thing had a through-line I’d been following deliberately.

As if each move was a decision I’d made with foresight rather than a pivot I’d made because something wasn’t working, or something else looked more interesting, or I’d simply changed. It’s a good story. I’ve told it enough times that I almost believe it. Hah.

The truth is, it’s messier than you think, and I think even more wildly interesting.

I’ve been a dual frontend developer and content designer. Then a web designer. Then a UX architect inside a large corporate structure, which is its own particular kind of identity. Then a freelancer, briefly, who went back to full-time when it got scary. Then someone building my self-run e-commerce brand Namisan alongside a corporate job, quietly, while still calling myself a web architect on paper.

And now: actually freelance, actually building, actually not sure what the sentence is yet.

Five different people. Maybe more, if you count the versions in between.

For a long time I treated each of those transitions as something to explain away. A gap to paper over. A detail to omit from the LinkedIn profile because it complicated the arc. The freelance period that didn’t last became “exploring options.” The pivot from development into design became “following my interests,” which is true, but it’s also the version that sounds most intentional in retrospect.

I spent years making my career sound more coherent than it was.

Herminia Ibarra writes in Working Identity about what she calls “provisional selves” — the identities we try on in the process of becoming. Career transitions, she argues, aren’t a straight path toward a predetermined destination. They’re a crooked journey. You inhabit a version of yourself provisionally. You test it. Sometimes it holds. Sometimes it doesn’t, and you move on to the next one.

I’d read that and thought it was about the future. About who I was becoming.

I didn’t realise it also applied backwards.

Every version of me that felt like a detour was actually a provisional self I was testing. The developer who realised she cared more about the experience than the code. The UX architect who got very good at the craft and then started to notice what the craft was costing her. The gutsy freelancer who decided to have a taste of freedom, went back to getting a full-time job when the uncertainty got too loud, who learned something specific and useful from that — about what she actually needed, and what she was willing to trade for stability.

None of those were wrong.

They were information.

I think the part that’s hardest to sit with isn’t the non-linearity itself. It’s the way we’ve been taught to read it. A career, the implicit script goes, should have a protagonist who knew what she wanted and moved toward it. Cleanly. With accumulating evidence that she was right. The CV should tell a story of arrival, not a story of wandering.

Any deviation from that arc — the pivot, the return, the sideways move, the gap — gets coded as something to recover from. Something to explain.

But what if it’s not? What if the pivots are the most honest part of the story?

Every time I moved, I moved because I’d learned something the current chapter couldn’t hold anymore. The developer learned she wanted to shape the whole experience, not just build it. The architect learned that being very good at something inside a large organisation isn’t the same as building something of your own. The person who went back to full-time learned that fear isn’t a good enough reason to stay anywhere.

The through-line isn’t a career direction.

It’s a person trying to figure out what she’s actually for.

I’ve stopped trying to make the story linear. Partly because I don’t think it is, and partly because my e-commerce shop exists, and the newsletter exists, and neither of them fit neatly into the arc I was performing.

They’re the parts that feel most mine. The parts I made because I wanted to, not because they made sense on paper.

Those don’t have a place in the polished version of the story.

I’m starting to think the polished version isn’t the one worth telling.

There’s something that shifts when you stop treating the non-linear path as a problem to manage and start reading it as a pattern instead. Not “how do I explain this?” but: “what is this actually telling me?” The developer who wanted to shape experiences. The architect who wanted to build something real. The person who kept returning to making things, whether it was a UX system or a small package of products for someone she’d never meet.

The data is all there.

I’ve just been trying to suppress it into a neater shape.

I’m 32 and I’ve been five different people at work and I’m not sure what number six looks like yet. But I’m pretty sure she isn’t going to apologise for the ones that came before her.

None of them were wrong.

They were her, working it out.

Do you feel that sometimes on your journey?

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Something weird is happening with AI, and I don’t think enough people are talking about it.

Everyone assumed it would replace the generalists first. The ones who dabble. The people who know a bit about everything and a lot about nothing. You’d think the specialists — the deep experts, the decade-in-one-thing people — would be safe. And the generalists would be the ones quietly replaced, bc what AI does is scan across domains and synthesise fast, which is exactly what generalists were doing manually.

That’s what I assumed too.

I was wrong.

What I’m watching happen instead — in the work I do, in the people I know who are building things right now — is the opposite. The generalist is suddenly the most valuable person in the room. And the AI is the reason why.

AI can execute. It can write the copy, draft the code, produce the first version of almost anything. What it can’t do is know which version matters. It can’t tell you whether the tone is off for your actual audience. It can’t feel when a product solves the wrong problem elegantly. It can’t notice that the strategy and the brand and the UX are all technically fine and somehow deeply misaligned. Those things require judgment that comes from having lived in more than one domain. From having moved around enough to see how the pieces touch each other.

The specialist, in a lot of rooms I’ve been in, is incredible at making AI go deep. But the generalist is the one who knows where to point it.

I’ve been building my own work this way. The design background and the writing and the strategy work and the client conversations and the reading I do about completely unrelated things — I used to apologise for all of that. Feel vaguely scattered about it. Like I should have stayed in one lane long enough to really be someone.

Now I’m using all of it, every day.

And the AI is what made that possible. Not because it does my thinking. But because it handles enough of the execution that what’s left — the actual differentiated work — is exactly the stuff that generalists are good at.

I think about all the times I was told to niche down. To pick one thing and go deep. All the advice I got, delivered kindly, from people with clean one-sentence bios. The implication was always that being interested in everything was a failure of discipline. A professional immaturity you’d grow out of.

What if it was training?

I don’t know if we’re at a turning point or just in a weird moment that corrects itself. I don’t know if the generalist era lasts or if the specialists find a way to adapt and the advantage disappears. I’m not making predictions.

But I notice the people doing the most interesting work right now are the ones who spent years frustrated by their own range. Who couldn’t explain what they did at dinner parties. Who moved between technology and design and writing and building something on the side, and got told, gently, that they needed to commit.

That was me. For a long time.

It came full circle.

They committed. Just not to one thing.

And now, in rooms where the AI can do almost everything with the right prompt — those people know which prompt to write.

It’s a strange thing to watch. Even stranger to be inside it.

What are you making with all your mismatched parts?

It’s always about pick one thing. Go deep. That’s how you build an audience, a brand, a business that lasts. They had a newsletter with 40,000 subscribers and a clean one-sentence bio and I believed them completely.

I spent six months trying to become a version of myself that fit in a single sentence.

It didn’t work. Not because I wasn’t disciplined… I was, probably too much so. It didn’t work because the thing I was trying to describe wasn’t one thing. It was the space between things. The particular way a person moves when they’ve lived more than one kind of life and can’t stop noticing how they connect.

The logic made sense to me at the time. If you want to be found, you have to be findable. I watched people with clean bios grow their audiences fast, and I thought I understood what was expected.

I tried it and there were months I was actually pretty good at it.

But somewhere in the applying, I lost the whole plot.

‘Pick a lane’ is advice built for products. The problem is it gets handed to people, specifically the ones already half-convinced they’re too much, too all over the place, too hard to explain. And it lands like confirmation.

Even the person with 40,000 subscribers thinks you need to simplify.

I think that’s where the real damage happens. Not in the strategy but in the permission.

Because what it’s actually saying, underneath all of it, is: the parts of you that don’t fit together are the parts you should cut. The curiosity that wanders. The thing you made last year that doesn’t match this year. The interest you can’t monetise yet. Trim those. Get legible. Match what the audience wants.

And a lot of people do. I did. I got very legible for a while and I was also, quietly, a little less myself.

But here’s what I’ve been witnessing instead; that there’s people who never quite niched down and built something anyway. They don’t look like a niche. They look like a perspective. A way of seeing that shows up across everything they touch, even when the topics seem completely unrelated.

I’ve tried to work out what makes it and honestly, I can’t. Or I can identify pieces of it but they never add up the same way twice. And I’m starting to feel it’s not something you build deliberately. It’s something you end up with after long enough of not cutting the parts that don’t fit.

Maybe it’s about your niche finding you, slowly, from the pile of things you couldn’t stop making.

The whole "pick a lane" strategy is designed to make you findable. It’s optimization, the right words in the right boxes. And I get it, visibility matters. But the stuff that actually changes you, the essays still sitting in an open browser tab a week later, the writers you return to when you’re trying to understand your own thoughts, they never start with a clean promise. They don't give you a roadmap upfront. They just invite you in, and you only see the pattern after you've been walking it for a while.

I think about the version of me that followed the advice properly. She’d have a cleaner bio. A more legible brand. Probably a faster-growing audience at first. She’d also have spent three years writing about a version of herself that was edited down to fit a category someone else named.

I’m not her. I tried to be, for a bit but it felt like wearing something tailored for a different body.

What I do instead is messier, non-linear and sometimes listening to intuition. I write about work and identity and what it costs to try to live more than one life at once — and sometimes about coffee shops and the strange particular loneliness of a Tuesday and the version of myself who didn’t take the risk.

A generalist’s brain in a world that rewards specialists. These things connect. I know they connect. I’m still working out how.

So I just make the next thing. Whatever is pulling. The piece that doesn’t fit. I follow that inner knowing.

Even now I don’t know yet if the complete shape will show up. I don’t know if the people who resisted the niche advice and built something real are an exception or a rule. I don’t know if I’m being principled or just scared of being legible.

Maybe there’s probably a bit of both?

The slow morning. The journaling. The retreats. The walk without your phone through somewhere beautiful. The moment of clarity that arrives, usually backlit, usually accompanied by a caption about finally choosing yourself.

I know that version because I tried it. Several times.

I made the vision board. Many, many times, and properly too. Printed images. Curated words of affirmation. A whole afternoon. Stuck them on with care. I looked at it for three days each time I walked into my room and felt absolutely nothing except vaguely embarrassed, which wasn’t the goal.

I tried morning pages. The gratitude pages. Three pages, long-hand, as soon as I woke up. The idea is that you clear your mind and the truth rises to the surface. What rose to my surface was mostly grievances. Shopping I’d forgotten. Mild resentment about a Slack message from three months ago. The truth, if it was in there, was taking its time.

I tried the five-year vision exercise. I tried the “values alignment” worksheet. I tried the evening reflection practice. None of them were wrong, exactly. They just didn’t reach whatever I was actually looking for.

I think what I was looking for wasn’t something a worksheet could find.

Because the thing I’d lost wasn’t buried underneath something. It wasn’t a locked room I needed the right exercise to open. It was more like a signal I’d been drowning out for so long I couldn’t hear it anymore. And no amount of journaling was going to help while I was still performing the version of myself who journals.

That’s the part nobody puts in the caption.

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That you can perform self-discovery just as fluently as you perform anything else.

That you can be deeply, convincingly busy with the work of finding yourself and still not be doing it. The morning routine becomes another task to optimise. The journaling becomes content. The walk without your phone becomes a photo opportunity, taken on your phone, posted an hour later.

I was doing all of it. And I was doing it exactly the way I used to do everything at work: efficiently, thoroughly, with measurable outputs.

It took a while to notice that the approach was the problem.

Herminia Ibarra writes in Working Identity that we don’t think our way into a new identity. We act our way there. Small experiments. New projects. Provisional roles we try on before we know if they fit. I’d read that and thought: good, I’ll plan my experiments.

I made a spreadsheet.

I’m not joking.

I made a spreadsheet of experiments I could run to discover myself. Which is, I now understand, exactly the wrong way to apply that insight. The experiments are supposed to be messy. Inconclusive. Not tracked in columns.

What’s actually started to work has been quieter than any of this.

It started with Namisan Matcha, my self-run e-commerce brand. Not the strategy around it. Not the planning. Just the actual making of it. Choosing a product because I liked it. Photographing it on my kitchen bench at 7am because the light was right, not because I had a content calendar. Sending a package to someone I’d never meet and feeling something small and real about it.

And this newsletter. Not writing it because I had something to say. Writing it to find out what I think. There’s a difference, and I didn’t understand it until I started.

I’ve realised that the finding doesn’t arrive. You don’t cross a line where suddenly you know. What happens is something smaller and less photogenic: you start noticing what feels real versus what feels performed. And slowly, over time, you choose more of the real.

I’m not found yet. Oh but that that sounds dramatic. What I mean is I’m still in it.

I’ve stopped running the experiments. I’ve stopped optimising the morning routine. I’ve stopped trying to convert every coffee into clarity.

Some mornings I just sit with the coffee. Not as a practice. Just because it’s morning and there’s coffee and that’s enough.

I’m not sure I would have believed, six months ago, that that would feel like progress.

Turns out it does.

Thank you for reading and until next time.

Katie xx

No calendar full of other people’s urgency. Mornings I shaped myself. A slow morning ritual I can take my time with and not have to apprehensively prepare myself for the morning meetings (that could have been an email). And the particular relief of not performing availability for hours at a time in meetings I attended out of obligation and left having said almost nothing that mattered.

I thought freedom would feel like space opening up.

It does. Some days it does.

But here's the thing I didn't see coming — and I'm still turning it over, trying to figure out what to do with it.

While I thrive in autonomy and value autonomous routines, there was an underlying loneliness that comes with it I wasn't prepared for. Not a devastating loneliness. More like the loneliness of eating at a restaurant you'd always wanted to try, alone. You're glad you went. And still you keep glancing toward the door.

What I didn’t think to account for was the rhythm problem.

When you work for yourself, you’re available all day. Which sounds like a benefit. And it is, mostly, until the middle of a Wednesday when everyone you want to reach is in their office hours, deep in their meetings, behind their inboxes. And you’re online. Posting. Putting something out. Watching it land into a feed that’s running on a clock you no longer keep.

Because they’re at their desks. And you’re not on that schedule anymore.

I spent years wanting off that schedule. It’s strange to be off it now and still feel its shape.

The other thing I didn’t think to replace was the colleague. I had someone I’d send half-formed thoughts to. Not emails — the kind of message that starts with “okay this is probably nothing but what if...” and they’d send back three words and somehow that was enough to unknot the whole thing. I didn’t realise how much of my thinking happened in that gap. The in-between space. The part that wasn’t formally the work but made the work possible.

That’s the part that doesn’t come with the freedom package.

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So I've been sitting with a contradiction I didn't expect. I wanted to work for myself. I also want community. Company. The particular comfort of being in something with someone. The part where we bounce ideas and challenge concepts, because perhaps that is what connection is about. And I thought, for a long time, that those two things were incompatible. That choosing one meant giving up the other...

I’m not sure that’s true anymore.

I think what I’ve been calling the dream — building something on my own terms, the days that are fully mine — I don’t think that dream was ever about being alone. I think it was about being with the right people, in the right way, doing work that felt like it actually belonged to me.

That’s a longer project than I realised when I started.

But here’s what I’ve noticed. The days I feel most like myself aren’t the ones where I was most productive. They’re the days something got unstuck. A voice note from someone who’s also building. A reply that opens into something. Someone saying “I’ve been thinking about this too” — and suddenly the work feels real in a way it doesn’t when it’s just me and the document.

That’s the thing the office was accidentally doing. Making the work feel witnessed. Giving your half-formed ideas somewhere to land before they were finished.

I don’t want the office back. I want that part. On my own terms, with people I’ve actually chosen.

Which is different from how I used to do it — proximity and obligation, calling it community.

I’m learning to build the real version now. It’s slower. It’s better.

By the time you get there, the script goes, you’ll have the career sorted. The values settled. The important friendships thinned down to the ones that actually fit. The messy, uncertain figuring-out part that defined your twenties will be behind you.

You’ll feel, in some quiet way, like you’ve arrived.

I turn 32 this year. And I’m still not sure I’ve arrived at anything.

Not in a frightening way. More like the way you wait for a room to feel familiar after you’ve moved into it. You expect it to stop surprising you eventually. And then one morning you notice something you hadn’t seen before, and you realise the room is still showing you things.

What caught me off guard was how much leaving my corporate job accelerated this feeling. I stepped out of eight years of structure expecting, on some level, to find a finished version of myself waiting on the other side. Someone who knew what she was building and why. Someone who’d done the becoming and was ready to just be.

Instead I found someone very much mid-sentence.

The career had been doing more identity work than I’d realised. Not just the job title, though that was part of it. But the whole apparatus around it. The certainty of knowing what Monday looked like. The ease of answering “so what do you do?” without having to think. The particular confidence of being someone who was good at something, and having that be enough.

Without it, I had to look at what was actually underneath. And what I found was someone still forming. Still revising her opinions. Still changing her mind about things she’d been sure of two years ago. Still, at 32, very much becoming.

The version of me I was at 25 wouldn’t recognise several things I care about now. My relationship to work. What I think success means. The kinds of mornings I want to have. That feels obvious when I say it, but I had genuinely expected it to stop being true. I thought becoming had a finishing line. That you crossed it somewhere in your late twenties, caught your breath, and then just maintained from there.

You don’t.

I’d always assumed that people who seemed settled in themselves had figured something out that I hadn’t yet. Some clarity arrived at through enough experience, enough good decisions, enough years. I thought I was behind. I’m learning that what I mistook for clarity was mostly just people getting more comfortable sitting with the uncertainty. Not having fewer questions. Just minding them less.

I’ve been reading Working Identity by Herminia Ibarra, and she talks about how identity doesn’t change through reflection alone. We don’t think our way to a new version of ourselves. We act our way there. We try things, take on new projects, inhabit new roles in a provisional way, and the identity follows the action rather than preceding it. You become the writer by writing. Not by waiting until you feel like one. I really like this approach to life.

I’m considered a Type B, especially when it comes to how I travel. I lean into spontaneity. Because I feel like when we travel, we’re discovering layers of ourselves that are yet to be uncovered. But that’s a story for another time! Gosh, I love how writing ignites one idea on top of another.

I found that both reassuring and terrifying in equal measure.

Reassuring because it takes the pressure off knowing. I don’t have to have it figured out before I start. I can write this newsletter before I feel like a writer. I can build my brands before I feel like a founder. I can call myself someone building a different kind of life before that life fully exists yet. The doing is the becoming. I’m allowed to act my way forward into the version of myself that’s still forming. And honestly, that’s the best way to learn.

In the same breath, it’s terrifying because it means the becoming doesn’t stop. Not at 30. Not 31. Not 40. Not ever, really. You’re always somewhere in the middle of a version of yourself you haven’t finished yet. Always in that slightly uncomfortable stretch between who you’ve been and who you’re growing into.

Nobody told me that part.

Or maybe they did, and I wasn’t paying attention. Maybe I was too busy wearing comfortable costumes — the corporate role, the reliable title, the tidy LinkedIn headline — to notice the parts of me still forming underneath.

Which is exactly why I keep going back to Japan.

There’s something I keep noticing there that I haven’t found a better word for yet. A quality in the older craftspeople, the ones who have spent decades mastering one thing. They don’t look like people who’ve figured it out. They look like people who have gotten very good at being where they are. In the work. In the day. In this particular version of themselves at this particular moment in their lives. Not finished. Just present.

I think what I mistook for arriving was actually just that. Presence. The willingness to be in the version of yourself that exists right now, without waiting for a more complete one to show up first.

I’m not there yet. I still catch myself wanting a cleaner answer. A neater way of explaining what I’m building and who I’m becoming. A sentence that makes it all sound more intentional than it sometimes feels.

But I’m getting more comfortable with the incompleteness. With the fact that the rooms are still showing me things. With the possibility that being 32 and full of questions isn’t a sign that I’m behind. It might just be a sign that I’m paying closer attention than I used to.

I thought the figuring-out part was supposed to be over by now.

I’m starting to think it might just be getting more interesting.

Still becoming. I think that’s exactly right.

Thank you for reading and until next time.

Katie xx

I thought if anything could reset me, it would be that. The markets, the slow mornings, the particular quiet of being somewhere that doesn’t know your job title or care about your LinkedIn headline. I’d been to Japan many times before and still yearning to go in the future... at this point it’s my second home.

I grew very familiar with the person I am when I set foot off the plane there. Even when I was travelling as a ‘tourist’, I distinctly recognised the way Japan slowed everything down, the way my shoulders dropped somewhere around the second day, and the way I started noticing things again.

The atmosphere of each hidden cafe. The texture of their ceramic cups. The gentle positioning of their carefully selected decor. The precise folding of a napkin. This time being back I thought I would feel something bigger. I thought I’d arrive back different.

But a few weeks in, everything still felt the same.

Not in a terrible way. Just a deeper layer of me. But still me. When I stood at a market in Kyoto at 7am watching a woman arrange persimmons one by one. Waiting to feel transformed, and slowly realising I’d brought all of myself with me. Every version. Every layer. The career, the identity, the particular shape of a person who spent eight years being useful. I’d packed all of it and carried it across twelve time zones.

I think I expected freedom to feel like becoming someone new. When in reality, it doesn’t. It feels like being left alone with who you already are.

Before I left, I thought the hardest part of a career change would be practical. The clients. The pipeline. The uncomfortable gap between what’s coming in and what’s going out. And those things are real. I won’t pretend the spreadsheet doesn’t exist. But they’re not the hardest thing of it all.

The hardest thing is how tightly you hold onto the version of yourself that your job built.

For eight years I was the person who knew what to do. Who managed the brief, ran the market, got things across the line and made sure to ship things on time.

I was introduced in meetings as “our APAC lead” and somewhere along the way I stopped noticing how much I’d started to live inside that sentence. The title wasn’t just a job. It was the answer to a question I didn’t know I’d been asking: am I worth something? The career was the proof. The ‘busy-ness’ was the evidence. I was always ‘busy.’ And if I was ‘busy’, it meant I existed, and therefore I mattered.

I’ve been reading a book called ‘Working Identity by Herminia Ibarra, and there’s an idea in it that’s been sitting with me for weeks. That when we leave a role, we don’t just lose a job. We lose a whole layer of self.

The reliable one. The useful one. The person people called when something needed doing. Layers and layers of identity we didn’t know we were wearing until we took them off and felt the cold.

Nobody tells you that the 9am call you resented was doing more than scheduling your morning. It was holding your whole sense of self in shape. The inbox, the meeting, the particular satisfaction of being needed. These aren’t just habits. They’re architecture. And when they go, the day isn’t just empty.

You are.

For months I kept looking for something to point at. Some proof that I still amounted to something without the title attached. I threw myself into my self-run e-commerce brand Namisan — the brand, the packaging, the positioning.

I took on multiple freelance briefs. I started this newsletter. All good things. All real. But I noticed something underneath all of it: I was building new costumes as fast as I’d taken the old one off. New answers to the same question. New ways to say: look, I’m still useful. Look, I still have somewhere to be.

The question underneath hadn’t changed. I’d just changed what I was wearing when I answered it.

Through it all I’m learning that this is the actual work. Not the freelance projects. Not the clients. Not building something new to replace the answer to “so what do you do?”

The actual work is figuring out who you are when nothing external is deciding for you.

When nobody’s scheduling your 9am or needing you in the room. When the proof has to come from somewhere inside instead. I don’t fully know how to do that yet. But on this journey, I’m learning how to.

Which is why I keep going back to Japan. Japan keeps showing me what it looks like from the outside. People who are just in the thing they’re doing — not pointing at it, not performing it, not waiting to feel like a better version of themselves once they’ve optimised enough. The woman with the persimmons wasn’t waiting to feel free. She wasn’t building a brand around persimmon selection or thinking about what it meant for her identity. She was just choosing a persimmon. Fully. Without needing it to mean more than it meant.

I’m not there yet.

But some mornings I get close. A slow drip coffee with cold foam at 6am, the light coming in flat and slow, no notifications, no proof required. Just me in the kitchen doing a small thing well. No title. No output. Just present in it. Those mornings feel like practice. Like something Im slowly learning to be instead of something Im trying to perform.

I’m starting to understand the difference. Leaving is a decision you make once. Freedom is something you build slowly, from the inside, after most of the architecture has come down and you’ve sat in the rubble long enough to figure out what you actually want to build next.

I’m getting there.

Thank you for reading and until next time.

— Katie xx

Then one morning I wasn’t.

I sat there and waited to feel something liberating. I didn’t. I read and hear all these stories online about people leaving their comfortable 9-5s, pouring their life savings and risking everything they built for themselves for the last 5+ years, only to leave and want something else.

I won’t lie, I subscribed to that notion. On the other side of all the perfect things on paper, beyond the resume, paychecks and accolades, there was another life where I work on my own terms. I have full autonomy and creativity to direct and take charge of this other life I’ve been dreaming of.

That morning, my last day at work when I closed my laptop and hoped for something amazing to happen. Would I feel extreme excitement? Did I feel the freedom I longed for all these years?

I didn’t. The home was the same. My office light was the same. I made coffee, slightly too strong, like how I always like it, and stood at the bench not knowing what to do with the fact that I had finally made space for the thing Id been putting off for years. With this comes another set of trials and hardships I anticipated.

But at the same time, I think I expected relief. A door closing, a weight lifting, that feeling you get at the end of a long-haul flight when the wheels finally touch down. What I got was a low hum I didn’t have a name for...Not that it was entirely terrible. But there was an added layer of silence in my day I cant seem to label yet...

For the next three days, at 9am, I kept opening my laptop out of habit. Just because 9am felt like it had rules and I didn’t know how to be in it without them. A shift in identity that I unknowingly subscribed to. This felt like the part everyone brushes under the rug.

Everyone shares the leaving. The “I finally did it” post. The office plants. The comments saying you’re so brave. Nobody describes what happens to your body when the alarm you set for years stops being necessary. How you reach for the shape of the old day and it isn’t there.

I’d been good at my job. Reliably useful. The kind of useful that gets noticed. Without it, I kept catching myself looking for something to point at.

I think busyness works like that. Not as a state you’re in — but as proof you’re showing. I was always ‘busy’, therefore I was worth something. The career wasn’t the thing I was building. I realised it was the ‘distraction’ for not asking what I actually wanted to build. And I have been choosing something else for so long because I felt it was the ‘safe’ option.

Over the years, I have trialled many ventures. I felt that I kept trying my hands at many things, hoping to find the answer in all of them. After my 9-5, my side hustle freelance business, running e-commerce shops, writing blogs. I guess I was not accepting one similarity that came with all these projects. That no matter what project, they all come with their stresses and challenges. They say the path you choose is also the path you will stress about.

The duality of life hey? Maybe my mind was pushing it aside because we all want to be comfortable. Years later, I finally came to accept this.

So what’s next? It is exactly the reason why I started this newsletter. And this time, promising to commit this to myself.

For my future self.

— katie

I’ve started a newsletter three times now.

Before this, I spent years building a digital footprint around the clean, predictable mechanics of tech and design. I wrote about UX frameworks, startups, and product design over on Medium. I loved the logic of it—the satisfaction of things built to function perfectly.

But when I tried to launch this space, I found myself instinctively drifting back into those same comfortable lanes. I got two issues in, hit a wall, and stopped. Twice. The writing looked crisp on the screen, but it felt completely hollow in my chest.

I was trying to optimize an identity I had already outgrown. I thought I was supposed to stay inside the room I built for myself.

This is the third version. It’s the honest one.

I’ve rebranded this space to the multiple lives theory because I’ve realized something about adulthood that nobody really warns you about: we are rarely just one person. What I actually want to write about is the slow, terrifying, and liberating exit from a default life. The psychological in-between where you’ve courageously dismantled the old structure, but you haven’t built the new one yet.

I want to talk about the math of going freelance, the friendships you can feel shifting while you’re still on the phone, and the version of yourself you were promised by 32 who never showed up—leaving you to realize you have to invent her yourself.

The thoughts that happen when you’re making coffee at 11:00 AM, and the quiet realization hits that nobody is looking for you, and you are entirely free.

I used to look for external mirrors to figure out how to be patient, how to “just be” in a moment. But the truth is, the patience isn’t hidden in another culture or a different country. It’s an internal muscle we have to build right here, in the messy middle of our own transitions.

Without boxing myself into a rigid corporate calendar, here is what you can expect from me in this space:

• Raw, Unperformed Essays: Deep dives into identity, career pivots, money, and what it actually feels like to drop the script in your thirties. No five-step listicles, no toxic positivity—just the real mechanics of changing your life.

• Notebook Snapshots: Shorter, unfiltered dispatches. A question I’m sitting with, an observation from the freelance trenches, or a raw thought straight from my morning coffee routine.

I’m not here to perform clarity that I don’t have yet. I’m just here to document the evolution.

A little bit about the current version of me: I’m a self-taught web developer, designer, and writer based in Sydney. Vietnamese-Australian. I’ve gone from deep science research, to fast-paced startups to corporate cubicles, and now to full-time freelance.

I drink too many iced lattes and ideating on jelly recipes, and I’m actively learning how to exist in the morning instead of constantly living three hours ahead of it.

If you’ve ever felt like you’re outgrowing the life you built and feel you are trapped between the script you were given and the multiple lives you keep imagining, I think you’ll find a home here.

Glad you’re here.

Katie xx