The Multiple Lives Theory

Going back isn’t always going backwards

Katie — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 18:01:25 GMT

Hi, I’m Katie. Welcome to Multiple Lives Theory, a place for anyone who has ever wondered: “How many lives can I live within this lifetime?”
I write about unlived lives, identity, reinvention, and what happens when the life you’ve built no longer quite fits. I’m writing from Japan at the moment, living as a digital nomad. A new essay lands every Sunday.

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The short version: going back to something you left can be a retreat or a return. From the outside they look the same. The difference, as far as I can tell, is whether you can say what you’re going back for.

By the usual reading, I’ve gone backwards twice in my working life. Both times I was the one doing the reading.

The first was leaving the lab. I had a chemistry degree and went into web development, because the lab work didn’t pay, and for about a year I described that to people as a detour.

The second was going back into corporate.

I’d been running my own businesses alongside my web development work, and then I took a role at a big global company. It felt like walking back through a door I’d made a bit of a point of walking out of.

What I remember most is the pre-emptive work. Rehearsing how I’d explain the move if anyone asked. Having a version ready that made it sound strategic, which it partly was, and confident, which it wasn’t. Most people were just curious about what was next for me. I don’t think I ever needed the speech.

These days it’s old colleagues who ask, and the question is usually “have you found a job yet?” It’s a fair question from where they’re standing. In their picture, what I’m doing now is the gap between two jobs.

I think what I was doing back then was measuring the direction of a move instead of what was in it. A career is supposed to point one way. Anything that points back gets called a retreat, whatever is actually inside it.

The distinction I didn’t have then is between a retreat and a return. From the outside they look identical, so I’m not sure anyone can really tell which one somebody else is doing.

A retreat is going back because the new thing got hard and the old thing would still have me. Nothing has changed in between. I’d be the same person walking back into the same room, hoping it holds the way it used to.

A return is going back for something specific, or carrying something I didn’t have before.

I went back into corporate for the money and the global roles.

That’s a less noble reason than I’d like, but it was a real one and I knew what I was getting. Those years paid for a lot of what I’m doing now. I spent a long time apologising for them anyway.

Going back for something also seems to make you harder to absorb. When I knew what I was there for, it changed what I agreed to, what got to me, and how much of myself I handed over.

If I can say what I’m going back for, it’s probably a return. If all I can say is that this is hard, I’m less sure.

The test I use, such as it is, is whether I can finish one sentence:

I’m going back for ______, for about ______ long.

A return usually fills both blanks with something specific.

Back for the money, for two years, to clear something. Back to a city because family is there and that matters more than I was admitting. Back into a field because I liked the work and only left because of one manager.

A retreat tends to fill the first blank with a mood. Because this is hard. Because it was easier. Because everyone else seems settled.

On the day, the two feel the same, which is the unhelpful part. But a mood has trouble with “what for?”, and something specific usually doesn’t.

I tried it on myself, because I’m always circling back to the idea of a 9-5.

When I fill in the blank honestly, what comes out is comfort, and the norm. Building something in public gets lonely, and it isn’t what most people in my circle are doing, so a regular job starts to look like a way back in.

I wrote about that pull last week, and I think this is the other half of it. By my own test that’s closer to a mood. I’m not completely sure it stays one.

I don’t want this to bless every reversal. Some going back really is going backwards. I’ve done that too, more than once, at a smaller scale, and told myself a good story about what I was going back for.

The other side worries me more, though. People who can’t go back for the thing they actually want because the arrow doesn’t allow it. So they keep going the right way, quietly wanting something behind them.

I’m learning Japanese now. I nearly enrolled in it at twenty and chose more science instead.

I’m picking it up more than a decade later, in the country, much more slowly than I would have then, and around work I didn’t have then.

The version of me who nearly did it at twenty would have been faster and had more time.

She’d also have been doing it for reasons that have since expired. I’m slower, and my reasons are still live.

Most days I think that’s the better trade. On the days I’m trying to read a form, I don’t.

By the arrow, that’s a long detour that ended up back where it started.

I can’t make myself mind about the arrow anymore. I think that’s either the whole point or the start of a longer argument I haven’t finished having.

If you’re weighing up going back to something, whether it’s a job, a city, a field or an old plan, try the sentence. You don’t have to show anyone what you wrote.

What would you go back for, if you could name it?

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How Do You Know What’s Worth Giving Up?

Katie — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 18:00:41 GMT

Hi, I’m Katie. Welcome to Multiple Lives Theory — a place for anyone who has ever wondered: “How many lives can I live within this lifetime?”
I write about unlived lives, identity, reinvention, and what happens when the life you’ve built no longer quite fits.
Essays from inside the transition, every week.

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Last week’s essay ended on a question I said I’d spend this one on: what would it cost to get any part of it back?

A few weeks before that I wrote about a promotion worth another $10,000 a year, and how safety sat at the front of almost every decision I made for about a decade. This essay is the other side of that decision. It’s about what I thought leaving would cost me, and how badly I priced it.

The number I kept checking

For about a year I made spreadsheets. Income, runway, mortgage, health cover, superannuation, flights, return flights. I changed the assumptions and ran different versions. I checked what would happen if I earned less than expected. The numbers were survivable every time. Not comfortable, but survivable.

And I still didn’t move for another 11 months.

It took me a while to see what that was telling me.

If the number was survivable and I still couldn’t act, money wasn’t the whole problem. I was working on the part of it that fit in a spreadsheet, and because that felt like work, I never questioned it. Every time I opened the file I got to be the competent version of myself, the one who plans and has a fallback, the one my family could trust with a decision. The spreadsheet never asked me anything I couldn’t answer.

The question I was avoiding was harder to admit.

I was afraid of being hard to explain.

The cost that had no number

My mum would ask what I was going to do next. In her mind there was a sensible sequence: go back to university, study something, get another job. That sequence had a shape. It had a job title and a path, something she could tell someone else when they asked what I was doing.

My family has always talked about security, about having a safety net and something to fall back on.

I think a job title is a safety net you can say out loud.

Leaving meant losing that, and becoming someone whose life didn’t fit neatly into a sentence. There’s no cell in a spreadsheet for your mother not being able to finish the sentence about what you do. I was paying that cost anyway.

Once I saw it, I could see I’d been keeping two sets of accounts.

Two columns

The first column held the costs I could price: money, months without a salary, logistics, benefits, time away from work.

The second held the costs I could only feel. Being misunderstood. Having to explain myself at weddings. Worrying my parents. Losing the respect of former colleagues. No longer being the person who was reliable, successful and easy to describe.

The second column was harder because every item belonged to a person. So I wrote down about five people, and next to each one I wrote what they would no longer be able to say about me. That was far more uncomfortable than writing out my monthly expenses, and it told me more.

Some of those costs were worth paying. If my parents worried, I could decide their peace of mind mattered enough to affect my decision. Others were old expectations I’d been carrying long after anyone had asked me to.

A cost can be real and still not be a reason to stay.

Try the two-column audit

If there’s a decision you keep postponing, take a page and make two columns. Over the first write what it costs you if you leave, change or say no. Over the second write what it costs you if you stay, continue or say yes.

Start with the obvious ones: money, time, status, convenience, relationships.

Then write the ones you’d rather not admit. Being misunderstood, disappointing someone, looking less successful, losing an identity you spent years building, having to answer questions.

Then go down every item and ask who bears it. You may find “my parents will worry” sitting next to “I will have less money” and notice they aren’t the same kind of cost.

You may also find that some of what you’re protecting belongs to other people, as their idea of who you should be.

What mine looked like

I’m outgrowing a version of me I used to hate

Katie — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 18:01:11 GMT

Hi, I’m Katie. Welcome to Multiple Lives Theory, a place for anyone who has ever wondered: “How many lives can I live within this lifetime?”
I write about unlived lives, identity, reinvention, and what happens when the life you’ve built no longer quite fits.
I’m writing from Japan at the moment, living as a digital nomad. A new essay lands every Sunday.

The short version: a pull toward my old life tells me what that life used to give me. It tells me less than I feared about where I’m meant to be.

I finish a project and I’m hungrier for the next one.

That part makes sense to me. It’s close to how I’m built.

The part that doesn’t make sense is what comes a little later.

I was walking through Sakae on my way to the gym, noticing the energy around me. It felt focused and responsible, calm and steady.

Maybe it was the sun, or maybe it was just how I was feeling that day. Whatever it was, it set off a wave of FOMO, and I started thinking about going back to a 9-5 and working for a company in Japan. I wanted the feeling of being needed again.

Valued, specifically, by an organisation, with a team and a title and a reason someone would notice if I wasn’t there.

Which is slightly ridiculous, because I left my corporate job in 2025 to build something else.

I’m living in Japan, working for myself — doing the thing I said I wanted. And in the middle of it, part of me was looking at other people’s ordinary working days and wanting one.

I didn’t do anything about it. I let it visit for a bit, went to the gym and focused on my workout, and somewhere in there I realised it was a fleeting thought.

I’ve tried a few explanations for why this happens. Maybe it’s FOMO, which would be unflattering but fair. Maybe I just want a quick hit of someone telling me I did a good job. I’ve gone back and forth between the two and neither one fully settles it.

What I have noticed is that the pull doesn’t come alone. The hunger for the next project, the wish to be needed and the attraction to that steady, responsible energy all seem to arrive from the same place.

I think of her as the career-builder. She didn’t leave when I did.

She’s still wanting the next thing, still wanting someone to notice she finished the last one, and still wanting a life that looks as settled as the one I was walking past.

She just doesn’t have an office to do it in anymore.

For years she ran most of my life. I chased promotions.

I worked out that changing companies doubled the salary faster than climbing one ladder did. I measured a day by what I produced in it. I’m not saying that to run her down. She was good at it, and she got me a long way.

What’s changed is that I can see her wanting things now. On that walk the pull arrived, I recognised it as a pull, I let it sit, and then I went and trained. She clearly hasn’t gone anywhere. There’s just someone else in the room now, watching her want things, and that someone has a bit more say than she used to.

The one who wants it and the one who notices it are both me. I find that more interesting than I expected. I just hadn’t thought of it as something that could happen on a walk to the gym.

There’s another version of me in here, and she’s the one I used to hate.

She isn’t the career-builder, exactly. She’s the one who made decisions in her twenties so she’d be seen. Chasing a promotion, chasing a status, doing things to prove to herself she could. I hated her for those decisions, and for the ones she didn’t make.

I still care about my career. It just looks different now.

It’s more playful, more aligned, and there’s more flow in it than there used to be.

And I don’t hate her anymore. I think that’s why the pull can get to me at all. If I still hated her, anything from her old life would be easy to dismiss, because I’d have every reason to want nothing to do with it.

Now that I don’t, the pull gets to sound fairly convincing. It’s also how I know I’m still outgrowing her, and not finished yet.

I only started feeling the pull toward that life once I stopped hating who I was in it.

For a long time I was rewarded in a particular way. Being relied on. Being the person people came to. A promotion, a bigger number, a title I could say out loud. The new life doesn’t hand that out the same way.

Nobody promotes you for finishing your own project, and nobody notices a good week unless you tell them. So when the hunger arrives after something’s done, my guess is that it goes looking for what I used to get, and the only place it knows to look is the old life.

That might also be why watching other people work sets it off, even though I couldn’t tell you a single thing about their actual jobs.

The steady part is harder to look at. In the old life, finishing something usually led somewhere visible. A review, a next role, a conversation about what came after. Now I finish something and the next thing is whatever I decide it is. I wanted that. It’s also less settled than I’m used to, so on a bright day, with a lot of calm, responsible energy around me, the old way of working looks attractive.

The easy way to read the pull is as a verdict on the new life, as if wanting the old thing means I made a mistake.

I try to read it as information instead. It doesn’t have to tell me what to do next.

When it gets loud, I remind myself that going back to a 9-5 right now would feel like going backwards.

I don’t think a 9-5 is a bad life, and if I ended up in one again that would be fine. It just isn’t what I want at the moment.

What I want is to live as a digital nomad, which is the thing I’m actually doing. I have more to say about going back, but that’s a different essay.

When I pulled mine apart, it turned out to be three requests arriving together:

To be needed. The old reward: being relied on, being the person people came to.
To look steady. The calm, responsible energy I walked past in Sakae.
To have something next. The hunger that shows up after a project ends.

Because they turn up together, they feel like one big request to go back. I’m not sure they are. Each one might have a smaller answer that doesn’t involve undoing anything.

Three questions I’m asking the next time it shows up:

What is it actually asking for? Being needed, looking steady, something next, or something I haven’t named yet.
Can the life I’m building give me some of that without going back? Even a small amount counts.
Is it still there once I’ve moved on to something else? In Sakae, by the time I was training, it had gone. If it keeps coming back, that’s worth paying attention to.

If you’re somewhere in this yourself, rebuilding after a life you’d already built, or starting again when the old one still fits on paper, I’d guess some version of this has shown up for you. It might have been a friend’s promotion, someone’s calm Monday, or a job ad you didn’t plan to open.

I don’t think it means you’re doing it wrong. It might just mean you’ve stopped hating the person you were when you had that life.

I still don’t know whether mine is FOMO or a quick hit of feeling valued. Some days it feels like one and some days the other, and I’m not convinced the difference matters as much as I’d like it to.

If you’ve felt the same pull, what do you think yours was asking for?

✍️ New here?

Multiple Lives Theory is for people in the in-between, when the life you’ve built no longer quite fits, but the next one hasn’t taken shape yet.

A new free essay lands every Sunday.

Paid members get The Multiple Lives Library, a growing collection of decision maps, workbooks, Notion dashboards, and practical frameworks for figuring out what you actually want and experimenting with what comes next.

The essays are where we make sense of the questions. The Library is where we start turning them into experiments.

What If You Regret the Life You Chose?

Katie — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 18:01:06 GMT

Hi, I’m Katie. Welcome to Multiple Lives Theory — a place for anyone who has ever wondered: “How many lives can I live within this lifetime?”
I write about unlived lives, identity, reinvention, and what happens when the life you’ve built no longer quite fits.
Essays from inside the transition, every week.

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There was a page I kept bookmarked through most of second year.

It was a program listing for Japanese studies, with a year abroad and a host family. I had it open so often it became a habit.

Then enrolment week came, I picked more science, and the page stayed bookmarked in a browser I don’t use any more.

I’ve told that story a handful of times, usually quickly, as a small funny thing about a girl who was very sure she was sensible. I’ve almost never told the part that matters. At the time I told nobody.

Not my parents, not the friends I saw daily, not the teacher who’d spent two years telling me I could write. The want lived in my head for about a year, then stopped, and nothing in the visible world changed.

I’ve called that regret for twelve years.

I don’t think the word fits, and I suspect many people use it for three different feelings. This essay separates them and gives you a short check to tell which one you’re carrying.

Why the word didn’t fit

Regret is meant to respond to information.

You make a choice, it goes badly, and the feeling updates you so you choose differently next time. It should shrink as evidence comes in.

Mine didn’t. It didn’t shrink with time or with success, and it didn’t shrink when my circumstances changed enough that the original objection no longer applied.

I’d say, it got more precise. A feeling that ignores new evidence isn’t judging a decision. It’s attached to something the decision never touched.

That gives you a first test. If your regret stays the same size when the facts change, it may be filed under the wrong name.

Three things that get called regret

1. Regret with an address.

There was a fork, with a date on it. You had real options, you took one and the other closed. You can point at it and argue about it. You can also test it, because what you wanted often still exists in some form, at a different price and on a worse schedule.

2. Regret with no address. The want never left your head. Nobody argued you out of it because nobody knew. There was no fork because you never brought it anywhere forks get discussed. It didn’t get overruled, it never entered the record. This kind doesn’t respond to living the life. You can end up in the actual country doing some version of the actual thing and the feeling stays put, because it was never about the country. It was about a whole want existing for a year, in detail, with a bookmarked page attached, and no one else knowing.

3. Comparison. It arrives looking like a serious reckoning with your past, and it’s usually set off by someone else. A person you went to uni with posts something from a life you once had a bookmark for, and within about four seconds you’re having a profound thought about your twenties. I wasn’t. I was having a smaller, less flattering feeling and calling it philosophy, because philosophy is more respectable than envy.

How to tell which one you have

Ask what year the regret is set in.

If your answer is a life, like the writing life or the version where I stayed in research, you’re probably looking at the first kind.

Lives are ongoing and you can check what one costs now. If your answer is a year, and it usually is if you sit with it for a second, you’re missing a person, not a life. For me it was a twenty year old at a desk with a browser open, who hadn’t said anything out loud and so hadn’t lost anything yet. I can’t go and get her, and I was faintly annoyed for a long time that moving countries didn’t fix that.

Then ask who knew at the time. If several people knew and it still hurts, the hurt is probably about the choice, and a choice can be re-examined. If nobody knew, the hurt is probably about the silence. I have a small collection of these now and almost all of them are the silent kind. That left me with a less comfortable question: why was I so consistently quiet about the things I wanted most?

Last, check the timing.

Real regret doesn’t need a trigger. It sits there at two in the morning with nobody’s holiday photos involved.

Comparison only shows up when there’s someone to compare against, and it fades about a day later. I can’t offer anything clever for this one. I just name it now and ask: what is this, and did somebody else start it? That question has saved me several evenings.

Why we’d rather have made a mistake

I hold this loosely. Calling it a wrong choice is easier than calling it an unspoken want.

If I chose wrong, I made an error, and errors can be analysed and fixed. That at least feels like agency. If I never said it, I wanted something and didn’t think it would survive contact with anyone else. That’s an admission about what I thought my wants were worth in a room, and it has nothing to do with decision making. So I filed it as a logistics problem, because those have solutions. I did that for twelve years and was fairly pleased with how rigorous I was being.

Silence also keeps the want deniable. If nobody heard it, I can revise it downwards later and decide it was never that serious, and nobody’s around to say you talked about this constantly for a year.

What regret is evidence of

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I ticked everything off the list and felt nothing

Katie — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 18:01:02 GMT

Hi, I’m Katie. Welcome to Multiple Lives Theory (MLT) 🍀 — a place for anyone who has ever wondered: “How many lives can I live within this lifetime?”
MLT is about identity, reinvention, and the lives we imagine but don’t always choose. These essays explore what those possibilities can tell us about what we want — and how to make decisions when more than one life feels possible.

When I was twenty-one I wrote a list.

Get the job. Get the experience. Earn more. Build something. Prove you can do it.

I can still recite it to this day, almost word for word, which probably tells you how often I went back to look at it.

Over the next ten years I ticked off every item. Not quickly and not easily, but all of them, roughly in order, the way you’re supposed to. And every time I reached one, the same thing happened. I felt a strange kind of nothing.

It wasn’t disappointment.

Disappointment feels like a reaction and I could have done something with a reaction.

This was flatter. Like it was muted.

A day and a half of being pleased, then the scanning would start up again for the next item.

How long is a day and a half supposed to last, for a thing you spent four years on?

The first time I remember it properly I was still at university. I’d studied for weeks for a science exam, I got the mark I wanted, and I felt nothing at all. I stood there waiting for the feeling to arrive. It didn’t. I decided I was probably just tired.

Then I did exactly that for another decade.

This was September in Sydney, my second year at a global enterprise company.

What I was actually thinking — and I can quote myself because I eventually wrote it down, was this: what’s wrong with me, everyone else thinks I’m doing amazing, why don’t I feel amazing.

Nobody noticed, and I don’t blame them.

I’m an energetic person. I hype people up, I ask a lot of questions, I’m interested in what everyone else is doing.

That reads, entirely reasonably, as somebody who is fine. Somebody would ask how it was going and I’d say it’s going great. Day to day, same old. My own tone was the evidence against me.

This has a name, it turns out.

The psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar, who taught positive psychology at Harvard, called it the arrival fallacy: the belief that once you get there, wherever there is, you’ll finally feel the way you’ve been promising yourself you’ll feel.

He noticed it first in himself, as a young squash player. He’d win a match or a tournament, feel happy for a short while, and then the next goal would appear and the feeling would be gone.

I read that and recognised the day and a half immediately.

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If you’ve felt this, it’s worth knowing that it’s common enough to have a name, and that it happens to people who are good at reaching things.

It isn’t a sign that you’re ungrateful or that something is missing in you.

You arrive, the feeling doesn’t, and because everyone told you it would, you assume the fault is yours.

The advice that usually comes with it is to enjoy the journey, or set better goals. I don’t think that quite reached my problem. The goals were fine as goals. What I’d done was ask a list to tell me who I was, and a list can’t do that.

So I left the job. I’d assumed, without ever saying it out loud, that the nothing was attached to it, and that removing the job would remove the nothing.

Three or four months later I was at my desk on a weekday afternoon doing admin.

Invoices. A form. An email I’d been avoiding for about a week. And I sat there and thought, quite calmly, that I might have made a massive mistake.

Same feeling. Different room. Nothing left on the list, nobody left to prove anything to, and there it was anyway.

That’s when I stopped being able to blame the job.

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If you’ve ever changed the big thing, the job or the city or the plan, and found the same feeling waiting for you on the other side, you’ll know how disorienting that is. It’s also useful information.

It tells you the answer was never going to come from swapping the room.

And this is the part I most want to get right, because it’s where I nearly went wrong a second time.

When a life you worked hard for stops fitting, there’s a very convincing next thought. If the list was wrong, then the decade was wrong. The job, the title, the money, the years of proving things. All of it was a mistake, so the honest move is to throw it out and start again from nothing.

You might recognise the voice that comes with it. I’ve wasted ten years. I should have known sooner. Everyone else is ahead and I’m about to go back to the start.

It feels brave. It feels like the opposite of the list.

But I think it’s actually the same thinking wearing a different outfit.

The list said a thing is either done or not done. Burning it all down says a life is either right or wrong. Both leave you standing in an empty room.

What I’ve been trying instead is closer to recycling. Or upcycling.

Taking what the old life left behind and making something with it that the old life never had in mind.

Because the list left a lot behind. That’s the part the nothing hid from me.

Every item felt empty on the day, and none of them actually were.

The shift out of medical research, the hustle years in tech, the businesses I built after the nine to five.

I’ve written before about the years I thought I wasted, and how often the useful part is exactly the part we cut from the story.

The templates I sell, the websites I build for clients, this newsletter. None of them were on the list. All of them are made from what the list left behind.

If you’re somewhere near where I was, here’s what I’d actually try.

Go back to your own list, written down or not, and next to each thing you ticked, write down what it left you. Leave aside what it promised and what it felt like on the day.

What’s still there?

A skill, a way of thinking, a person you met, a fact about yourself you had to learn the hard way.

Ten minutes and a notes app on your phone is enough.

On mine, “get the experience” would say: I can walk into a role I haven’t fully vetted and find the one useful thing in it.

“Earn more” would say: a bigger title doesn’t quiet the part of me that’s still asking what’s next. Neither of those felt like anything on the day. Both of them turned out to be load-bearing.

You’ll probably undercount yours at first, because the day itself felt like nothing. That’s the arrival fallacy working backwards.

It flattens the finish line, and then it hides what the finish line left you.

Then look at what you wrote and notice which of those leftovers you’d happily use with no finish line attached.

The ones you’d keep doing even if nobody was counting. Those are your materials. They’re usually quieter than the achievements.

They’re the things you do when nobody has asked you to.

Then make one small thing out of them, alongside the life you already have.

You don’t need to quit anything to do this.

A side project, a class, a piece of writing, a conversation with someone who does the thing you’re curious about.

An experiment before a decision. If it works, you’ve found a thread. If it doesn’t, you’ve lost a few weekends, and the old life is still standing.

Keep your real constraints in view while you do it. The rent, the people who depend on you, how much energy you actually have after a full week.

Upcycling works with what you have, and that includes the limits. A small experiment you can sustain will teach you more than a dramatic leap you can’t.

None of this requires you to have been wrong about your twenties or any decade really.

You were building.

You just didn’t know yet what you were building for.

I’d like to tell you this has fixed the nothing for good.

It hasn’t, not completely. Some weeks the work I do now feels genuinely different, like I’ve finally found a measure that doesn’t run out on me. Other weeks I suspect it’s a slower checklist with better manners. I can’t always tell the two apart from in here.

But I notice the question has changed. I used to ask whether a thing was finished.

Now I mostly ask what it’s made of, and what else it could become.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about standing in a supermarket in Nagoya with a plastic basket, in the life I’d spent a decade thinking I’d missed.

Japan was a want from those same university years, and it’s the one thing that never made it onto the list.

I didn’t get there by starting over.

I got there carrying everything, the list and the nothing and the decade in between.

I don’t have to give any of it back. Neither do you.

What did your last finish line leave behind that you haven’t used yet?

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Multiple Lives Theory is for people in the in-between, when the life you’ve built no longer quite fits, but the next one hasn’t taken shape yet.

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The Three Lives Board: Explore Multiple Paths Without Choosing Just One

Katie — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 12:01:43 GMT

Hi, I’m Katie. Welcome to Multiple Lives Theory (MLT).
MLT is about identity, reinvention, and the lives we imagine but don’t always choose.
These essays explore the questions, ideas and practical ways of thinking that can help us understand what we want, make decisions without having all the answers, and build lives that feel more like our own.

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The form had one box for occupation.

It was an ordinary form, filled in at a desk in a rented apartment with a pen that belonged to the building.

I had filled in enough of them that year without thinking about it.

This one I sat with for longer than it deserved, and then wrote the word that matched the invoices, because that was the one that would hold up if anybody checked.

The pause was not because I didn’t know. It was because I had three answers, all of them true, and the box only wanted one.

I have been doing some version of that pause for years.

The question is always the same: which one?

Which one is the real one? Which one would I choose if somebody actually made me?

I ask it in airports, in the shower, at two in the morning.

I’ve asked it often enough now to notice that it has never once produced an answer.

The three are still there, more or less in the same order, wearing more or less the same clothes they had on years ago.

It is tiring in a way that is hard to explain if you have one answer. I think that’s because the tiredness doesn’t come from the work.

It comes from feeling permanently under review.

There is a small shame underneath it too.

Being able to do several things is supposed to be a good problem, so when it doesn’t feel like one, there is nobody particularly obvious to say that to.

The page that became the board

At some point, thinking about the three lives in my head stopped being useful. So I put them somewhere I could actually look at them.

This sounds like nothing, except that after about a decade of taking the question extremely seriously, I had never once written all three down on the same page.

That page is the reason the rest of this exists. It is also where the first problem turned up, in my own handwriting.

Each of the three had a name. Not a description. A name.

And a name is not a neutral label. It arrives with a wardrobe, a schedule, an income, a certain kind of morning, and a way of being described at a party by somebody who is not you.

Names are exclusive in a way that lives are not.

You cannot really be called two things at once, so the moment I gave those three futures names, I had built a competition.

Then I spent years failing to settle a competition I had invented myself.

The problem was not the three lives. It was the list.

The upside is that it at least left me something I could work on.

If the names were doing the damage, I needed to look at the three lives some other way.

The only way I could think of was to stop asking what each life was called and start asking what it would actually consist of on a day when nothing particularly interesting happened.

The life I know, the life I imagine, the life I can’t picture

The first I didn’t have to imagine, because I am in it.

It is the one other people call the safe option, which is funny, because it is the one with the invoices in it.

At four in the afternoon, I am usually inside somebody else’s website, doing work I’m good at, for a person who is pleased with me. What gets better if this continues is that it compounds.

What gets harder is that it compounds in a direction chosen by whoever happens to be paying.

I’m becoming good at a specific thing slightly faster than I’m deciding whether I want to be.

The second is the one where writing is the work rather than the thing at the edges of it. Here, the day goes thin quite quickly.

The morning is easy to picture because I already have it.

The afternoon is where it fails, because in the version I run in my head, the afternoon is more writing, which is obviously wrong because nobody writes all afternoon.

The truthful answer is that I don’t know what most of that day contains.

The parts I can see clearly are the parts I already own.

The third has never made it into a day at all.

I can describe the shape of it for about two sentences: something about making things that are mine and putting them out without a client standing between me and whoever ends up using them.

And then it stops.

For a long time, I took that as evidence that it wasn’t serious. I’m less sure now.

It might be the only one of the three I didn’t assemble out of other people’s versions. And the reason I can’t picture the afternoon may simply be that I’ve never watched anybody else have one.

Put them next to each other and the difficulty stops being quite so mysterious.

One is fully furnished and quietly narrowing. One is half-built out of hours I already like. One won’t come into focus and won’t go away either.

Nobody is wrong, which is the actual problem.

If one of them were obviously a fantasy, this would have resolved itself a decade ago.

But something else happens when you lay three ordinary days side by side, and it took me a while to see it, mostly because I was still looking for the winner.

What I built, because one page could not hold it

By this point, the page had started getting crowded. I had notes in the margins, questions underneath the questions, and had started losing track of which answer belonged to which life. I realised I needed somewhere to put all of this that wasn’t just another page in my notes.

So I built The Three Lives Board.

It lives in the Reinvention Library, and it is an eight-stage guided audit for doing exactly this: holding three possible lives at once and looking at them closely without having to decide which one wins.

That part matters to me. The board isn’t designed to get you to pick a life and commit to it. It is designed to help you understand what keeps pulling you towards each one, what they have in common, what is actually getting in the way, and what you might be able to learn before making anything irreversible.

It starts with Open, where you name the three lives you’re carrying around.

Life 01 is the life you keep thinking about.

Life 02 is the life you wonder if you’re allowed to want.

Life 03 is the life you haven’t considered seriously yet.

That last one can stay empty. I wanted it to, because sometimes there isn’t a third answer yet, and an empty space is more useful than forcing yourself to invent one.

There is one rule at this stage: describe a life, rather than a job title. “Ceramicist” doesn’t tell you very much beyond the thing you already know you want to do. “The one where I make things with my hands and the week has a shape I chose” gives you something you can actually investigate.

From there, the board asks you to spend time inside each life.

Imagine asks what this life would actually feel like to live, rather than what it sounds like from the outside.
Decode asks what you are actually longing for underneath it. This is where you might start noticing that three very different lives are carrying the same want.
Distinguish asks what is genuinely stopping you, which means putting things like money, people, timing and geography on the page instead of letting them become one large, shapeless reason why you can’t.

Then comes the part I think is most useful: learning without deciding.

Test asks what you could find out about each life without committing to it. You might not be able to live the whole thing yet, but there may be something you can test.
Compare lets you put all three back beside each other and look at what they are telling you as a group.
Integrate is where you look at what can come with you into the life you already have, and what can’t. Some parts of an imagined life turn out to be surprisingly portable. Some really don’t. I didn’t want the board to flatten that distinction just to give you a satisfying answer.

And finally, Experiment asks what you want to try next.

Not a five-year plan. Not a dramatic decision.

Paid subscribers can read the rest of this essay and get full access to The Three Lives Board to map out their own paths

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I moved to Japan for a life I thought I’d missed

Katie — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 19:01:35 GMT

Hi, I’m Katie. Welcome to Multiple Lives Theory (MLT) 🍀 — a place for anyone who has ever wondered: “How many lives can I live within this lifetime?”
MLT is about identity, reinvention, and the lives we imagine but don’t always choose. These essays explore what those possibilities can tell us about what we want — and how to make decisions when more than one life feels possible.

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It’s a Tuesday morning in Nagoya and I am standing in a supermarket aisle holding a plastic basket, looking at rows of unagi rice and pickles and trying to work out which of the things in front of me is the one I actually came in for.

Around me there is that polite rhythmic hum of Japanese, a language I don’t speak yet. I’m buying household essentials. It is the least remarkable thing a person can be doing on a Tuesday.

And standing there I had this strange thought, which is that I had imagined this exact life about a decade ago, and the woman who finally turned up for it isn’t the one who imagined it.

I should go back, because the wanting started earlier than that.

I was in a primary school library doing a cultural project where you had to pick a country and talk about its food and its stories.

Other kids were drawn to anime. I ended up in the origami section, and I remember being completely taken by the fact that a flat square of paper could become something that looked alive, and that it was so disciplined about it.

So I picked Japan because of the origami.

And then because of the cranes.

There’s a story about a girl in Hiroshima called Sadako Sasaki who was diagnosed with leukaemia and held on to the legend that folding a thousand paper cranes would grant a wish.

I looked this up again recently because I wanted to be accurate about it.

She was two when the bomb fell, diagnosed ten years later, and her family have said she folded over 1,300 cranes before she died at twelve.

I was a child reading that and what I took from it was not really about Japan.

It was that even inside something that overwhelming you could still make something beautiful with your hands.

That’s what Japan meant to me before it meant anything else.

By university it had turned into something less romantic and more restless.

I was born and raised in Sydney and my life there was, in a way that I find hard to complain about without sounding ungrateful, already shaped.

There was a Katie-shaped hole and I fit it exactly.

Family knew who I was. My neighbourhood knew who I was.

And for someone who lives mostly in her own head and questions everything, that starts to feel like living inside a frame somebody else built.

What I wanted wasn’t adventure exactly.

It was the radical freedom of being a stranger.

Somewhere with no agenda to meet and no earlier version of me to keep up.

I didn’t go. And the reason I didn’t go is the part I want to be honest about, because it wasn’t really money or timing. I was running on FOMO.

I’d watch people my age chase six figures and land jobs in the glass towers in the CBD, and I’d think, what am I missing here, what is so great about level 60.

And then I’d go and want it too.

Not because I wanted it.

Because I couldn’t stand the feeling of being the one who didn’t.

I ticked the boxes, I got the roles, I ran on high cortisol for years, and eventually I got to a point where I didn’t recognise myself.

Somewhere in there Japan quietly stopped being a thing I was going to do and became a thing that belonged to twenty-something Katie.

She had no anchors. She had no decade of responsibilities and no dozen versions of herself living in other people’s heads.

The move felt like hers, and I had become someone else.

I think that’s the part we get wrong about unlived lives. We don’t decide we can’t have them. We decide they belong to a person who no longer exists.

So here is the thing I did not expect about actually getting here.

I don’t want her life.

I spent a long time grieving the years I didn’t spend here, and now that I’m standing in it, finding my rhythm, learning the rubbish days, working out which supermarket is the good one, I can see that she was chasing something quite different.

A thrill. Somewhere to belong. Probably proof that she could do it alone.

I’m not doing that. I came here on my own terms, which took years to afford in a way that was only partly financial.

I could have taken the sponsored visa and the stable job and arrived here five years earlier inside somebody else’s parameters, and I would have hated it, because the thing I actually wanted was never Japan.

It was not being inside anyone’s parameters at all.

I didn’t come here to go backwards.

I came carrying everything forward.

A way of integrating forward.

The corporate years, the businesses, the boxes I ticked for the wrong reasons, all of it is stitched into the person standing in this supermarket, and I don’t have to give any of it back to be allowed to be here.

Which makes me think we misunderstand these lives when we talk about them as lost. Maybe an unlived life doesn’t close.

Maybe it changes shape, and waits, and gets lived later by someone more complicated than the person who first wanted it.

So the question I keep turning over is not whether you missed something.

It’s this.

What is the life you decided you had missed, and if you got some version of it now, would you actually want the one you imagined then?

I’m drafting these thoughts on my phone standing still in the supermarket, by the way.

I still don’t know what half of this is. I felt I had to capture this in its raw form before these thoughts go.

I’ll work it out, slowly, in a language I’m only starting to learn, in a city where nobody has known me longer than a few weeks.

It is nothing like what I pictured at twenty-five.

It’s better, and it is also completely ordinary, and I think both of those are the same fact.

Maybe it was never late.

Maybe it was waiting for me to become someone who could live it differently.

What is the life you decided you had missed, and would you still want it in the shape you imagined it?

I’ve been thinking more about this here through these writings:

The Reinvention Library is where the tools live

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🍀 Multiple Lives Theory is for people in the in-between, when the life you’ve built no longer quite fits, but the next one hasn’t taken shape yet.

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I knew what I didn’t want to lose. I just didn’t know what I wanted.

Katie — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 20:00:47 GMT

Hi, I’m Katie. Welcome to Multiple Lives Theory — a place for anyone who has ever wondered: “How many lives can I live within this lifetime?”
I write about unlived lives, identity, reinvention, and what happens when the life you’ve built no longer quite fits. Essays from inside the transition, every week.

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For most of my working life I made my decisions around safety. Or should I say safety made the decisions for me.

Not ambition. Although from the outside it probably looked like ambition.

I took the salary I couldn’t say no to.

I bought a house. I went for the promotion which was worth another $10,000 a year.

I started many micro-businesses on top of the job, partly because I wanted the extra money and partly because I wanted the skills.

Yet both of those turned out to be the same answer wearing different clothes.

Everything was a hedge against something. There was a stretch where I wanted to stop.

Not dramatically. I wanted a few months of not being anybody’s anything.

Instead, I went back to work because my family was going through a hard patch and going back was the most obvious and secure thing to do.

I look back and I don’t tell that story as a sacrifice. It genuinely didn’t feel like the best decision at the time.

I became fluent in the questions

“You need something to fall back on.”

Some version of that sentence has been said to me by nearly everybody in my family, about nearly every choice I’ve made.

“Is it stable?”

I’ve been asked that about every job I’ve ever taken, about the business, and I still get asked it.

Is it permanent?

What happens if?

I don’t think this is unusual.

I think this is what happens in families where money was never a given. You inherit a way of thinking about the world without necessarily inheriting the awareness that you’ve inherited it.

Nobody sat me down and told me to be careful. I somehow picked it up along the way and became fluent in being careful.

For a long time, I thought I was a cautious person by temperament.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to consider that I might simply be repeating a household.

The strange thing about inherited beliefs is that they rarely announce themselves as beliefs.

They sound like judgement.

They sound like common sense.

They sound like you.

I had detailed opinions about risk

I could tell you exactly what I was protecting.

The salary.
The mortgage.
The fallback.
The skills.
The future version of me who might regret having given something up.

I had detailed opinions about risk.

What I had surprisingly little detail on was what I actually wanted my days to look like.

Not my life.

My days.

I had a very good answer for what I didn’t want to lose, and almost no answer for what I wanted to gain.

Ask me what I wanted a Wednesday afternoon to feel like, and I wouldn’t have known.

I’d spent so long thinking about what I was supposed to be doing that I’d never really stopped to think about how I wanted my life to feel.

That gap is easy to miss.

Because a life built around protecting what you already have can still look like a life with direction.

The salary goes up.

The mortgage goes down.

The title gets better.

The business starts turning over.

From the outside, you’re doing very well.

And you might be.

But there’s a strange possibility hiding underneath all that sensible progress:

You can become very good at building a life you can defend without ever getting equally good at describing the life you want.

I think that was happening to me.

Safety came with a lever

The other reason I kept choosing safety was that it gave me something to do.

If the problem was money, earn more.
If the problem was security, get the permanent job.
If the problem was experience, start the business on the side.
If the problem was uncertainty, make a more sensible plan.

There was always another lever.

Desire is less cooperative.

“What do you actually want?” doesn’t come with a spreadsheet.

It doesn’t tell you how long it will take.

It doesn’t guarantee that the thing you want will work.

And sometimes you don’t know yet.

That makes it a particularly difficult question for people who have spent years being rewarded for making sensible decisions.

You can get very practiced at asking:

How do I make this safe?

And forget to ask:

Do I actually want this?

The part I didn’t expect

I assumed that changing my external circumstances would change this in me but it didn’t. There is a business now, and it has its own version of the same weather.

Then multiple questions fire at me all at once.

Is the thing running? What is next? Where is the market going?
Am I reading it right?
Should I be doing more? Should I be protecting what I’ve built?
Will this business work?

The questions arrive at the same hour of the night they always did.

I assumed working for myself would change the tone at least. It didn’t.

Because the thing I had to change wasn’t only the job.

It was the system I had been using to decide what was worth doing.

The version of me who needed everything to be safe didn’t disappear when I left employment.

She came with me and I realise she was never the problem.

She was and is useful.

She knows how to check the figures. She knows how to think ahead. She knows what happens when you don’t have enough money. She knows that other people depend on you.

I still don’t know how to get rid of her. I still don’t know whether I want to get rid of her. I just don’t want her to be the only one making the decisions.

What I am still learning to ask

I used to think the goal was to reach some future point where I’d finally feel secure enough to stop calculating.

A number in the bank. A stable business. A milestone.

Something that would make me stop checking.

I am learning along this journey that I don’t think that definite position exists.

Since things will continually evolve and change.

There will probably always be something to protect.

The question I’m more interested in now is: what else do I want to build my life around?

What do I want my Tuesday to look like?
What do I want my life to feel like while I’m building it?
What kind of work gives me energy rather than simply paying for the things I need?
What would I choose if I wasn’t trying to make the choice defensible to everyone else?
What am I protecting and what am I protecting it for?

I don’t have neatly packaged answers to all of those and I am learning to embrace perhaps I am not meant to.

Maybe this is one of the less glamorous parts of reinventing your life that we don’t talk about enough.

You don’t necessarily have to become fearless. You might just have to become more interested in what you are protecting your life for.

The version of me who needed it to be safe is still here.

I don’t think she’s going anywhere.

There’s something bittersweet about that. Knowing that the part of me that wants to protect what I’ve built will probably always have a voice.

I’m just learning that she doesn’t have to be the only one making the decisions.

If this landed, these go deeper:

→ How do you know what you actually want

→ The version of me who wanted something slower

✍️ New here?

🍀 Multiple Lives Theory is for people in the in-between, when the life you’ve built no longer quite fits, but the next one hasn’t taken shape yet.

A new free essay lands every Sunday.

The essays are where we make sense of the questions. The Library is where we start turning them into experiments.

Written from inside the transition, not the other side.

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I was tired for three years

Katie — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 20:00:43 GMT

Hi, I’m Katie. Welcome to Multiple Lives Theory — a place for anyone who has ever wondered: “How many lives can I live within this lifetime?”
I write about unlived lives, identity, reinvention, and what happens when the life you’ve built no longer quite fits. Essays from inside the transition, every week.

Subscribe now

For about two or three years, I was tired. But in a way that did not respond to sleeping. My spirit was tired.

My face appeared puffy in every photo from that time. I put on weight, the kind that arrives after years of stress and being wound up for too long rather than from anything in particular that I ate. On top of that, over exerting myself running 2 online businesses and training for my first marathon.

I could see the cortisol weight it in my clothes before I let myself see it anywhere else.

I wore the same two or three things because they were the ones that still sat right.

There was no single day.

I keep looking for one because a day would make a better story. Maybe because a day would also have been easier to act on.

But what actually happened was a build-up, and the place I started seeing it accumulate was in the mirror.

Every morning, the same face, a little further from the one I recognised.

And the same question sitting behind it, which was never really about the work:

How long can somebody look at that and keep filing it under busy?

The explanation

I did say I was tired.

I said it often enough that it became a normal thing to say, which is possibly how it stayed unexamined for so long.

And every time I said it, somebody helped.

“Oh, just take a break.”
“Yeah, you need some time.”
“Take it day by day.”
“Be nice to yourself.”

None of them were wrong.

They were just answering a slightly different question.

I was saying I was tired, but what I was actually trying to understand was why I could keep functioning inside something that was making me feel increasingly unlike myself.

Work was the easiest explanation because work is a thing you can point at.

The company.

The manager.

The commute.

The hours.

I could imagine the fix. Different company. Better manager. Four weeks somewhere. Less work.

Every explanation came with a lever attached.

That was useful.

It was also, I think, part of the problem.

Because what I was eventually tired of was not just the work.

It was the shape of my days.

The commute was part of it.

The hour I got home was part of it.

What I had energy for afterwards, which was almost nothing, was part of it.

The job was one piece of an arrangement that had stopped working for me.

If the job had suddenly become perfect, would the arrangement have held?

I don’t think it would have.

That was an important thing to realise.

It was also not, by itself, very helpful.

Being correctly informed

We talk about clarity as though it is the missing ingredient.

As though once you finally understand what is wrong, the next step becomes obvious.

Sometimes it does.

Sometimes it doesn’t.

Sometimes you can understand your own life with almost uncomfortable accuracy and still not be able to change it.

That was the part I hadn’t expected.

I knew I was tired.

I eventually understood that I wasn’t simply tired of my workload.

I could see that the problem was bigger than the job.

I could name things I had been tolerating for years.

And still, nothing immediately changed.

There were long stretches where having the right diagnosis almost made me feel worse.

Because once you can see the problem clearly, not acting on it starts to look like a personal failure.

You know.

So why are you still here?

I think we underestimate the distance between knowing and being ready.

Knowing is cognitive. Readiness is everything else.

Money.
Energy.
Fear.
Relationships.
Identity.

The consequences of being wrong.

The possibility that the thing you leave will turn out to have been more valuable than you realised.

The possibility that the thing you move towards won’t work.

Sometimes you are not choosing between a bad life and a better one.

You are choosing between something you know how to survive and something you cannot yet see how to survive.

That makes change considerably harder than most advice makes it sound.

What I was actually asking for

There is another part of this I have thought about for years.

The friends.

Most of mine are solution-oriented people.

Someone reports a problem and they hand back a fix, quickly, because fixing something feels like helping.

I do this too.

Somebody tells me they’re struggling and I immediately start looking for the lever.

I will probably do it again this year.

What I wanted from my friends was actually much smaller than advice.

I wanted somebody to say:

“Yeah. I get you. I’m tired too.”

And then not fix anything.

I never actually asked for that.

Which makes it difficult to blame anybody for not giving it to me.

But I think there was something else underneath my inability to ask.

Asking for advice is a request with a shape.

There is something for the other person to do.

Asking someone to sit beside you in something that has no solution yet feels different.

There is no task at the end of it.

No useful thing to hand back.

Just: this is hard, and I don’t know what I’m going to do about it yet.

Maybe that is why we so often translate uncertainty into a request for advice.

Advice gives uncertainty an exit.

Sometimes what we actually need is somewhere to stand while we are still uncertain.

The reframe isn’t the fix

I have caught myself inside this life, tired again in a way I recognise.

Not in exactly the same way.

But enough to know that I was probably wrong to think I had solved anything permanently by understanding it once.

That might be the part of this I find most useful now.

A reframe is not a fix.

Realising that your career no longer fits is not the same as knowing what career should replace it.

Realising that your life has become too small is not the same as knowing what you want to build instead.

Realising that you have been living according to somebody else’s timeline does not immediately give you a new one.

Sometimes the most honest thing you can know is:

This isn’t working anymore.

And then you have to live for a while with the fact that you don’t yet know what comes next.

I used to think that gap meant I wasn’t clear enough.

Now I think sometimes it is simply the gap.

The space between recognising that the old life no longer fits and having enough evidence, energy, courage, money, or desire to build something else.

And maybe we make that space harder than it needs to be because we expect clarity to behave like a decision.

It doesn’t.

Sometimes clarity is just the first piece of evidence.

Sometimes it takes years before you can act on what you already know.

That doesn’t necessarily mean you are avoiding your life.

Sometimes you are still gathering the capacity to change it.

I think about that now when I hear myself say I’m tired.

I try not to reach immediately for the explanation that comes with a lever.

I ask a slightly harder question.

What am I actually tired of?

Not because the answer will tell me what to do.

But because it might tell me what I have been trying not to see.

If this landed, these go deeper:

→ How do you know what you actually want?

→ The version of me who wanted something slower

✍️ New here?

🍀 Multiple Lives Theory is for people in the in-between, when the life you’ve built no longer quite fits, but the next one hasn’t taken shape yet.

A new free essay lands every Sunday.

The essays are where we make sense of the questions. The Library is where we start turning them into experiments.

Written from inside the transition, not the other side.

Upgrade to paid

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What If the Life You're Building Isn't the Life You Want?

Katie — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 12:02:13 GMT

Somebody paid me for a web architecture and SEO audit.

Two hours of work.

An assessment, a set of recommendations, done inside an afternoon.

I had spent most of the year before that thinking very carefully about what to do with my life, and I had arrived nowhere in particular.

Two hours of fairly ordinary work told me more than the whole year had, and I am still slightly annoyed about it.

Not because the work was profound. It was a document and some sensible suggestions about how a website was put together.

It was that somebody had put money on a version of me I had not been thinking about at all.

A year of thinking

Here is what that year actually consisted of.

Reading.

Making lists.

Opening a document called “options” and closing it again. Talking it over with people who were kind about it. And deciding, roughly every six weeks, that I probably needed a bit more information before I could decide anything.

None of that produced a single new fact. It reorganised the facts I already had, over and over, in slightly different orders.

I think that is the part nobody warns you about during the thinking stage.

It feels like progress because it is effortful, and effort and progress have been the same thing for most of our working lives.

You put the hours in, something moves. Except here nothing moves, and the hours still feel like they should count for something.

It also cost me a kind of confidence, because the longer I went without deciding, the more I suspected the problem was me rather than the method.

I thought, somebody who cannot answer a simple question about her own life after twelve months of trying must, at some level, be avoiding the answer.

That was not quite right either.

I was not avoiding an answer.

I realised I was asking a question that thinking cannot answer, and then being disappointed in myself for not thinking harder.

Nothing had gone wrong

Which was most of the problem.

It is much easier to question a life that has failed than one that is working.

If the job is terrible, leaving is a story anyone can follow.

You say the words and people nod.

If the job is objectively fine and the money is fine, and you are reasonably good at it, and you still do not want to spend the next decade doing it, there is no sentence for that which does not sound ungrateful.

So you do not say it. And because you do not say it, you do not really examine it either, and it stays a mood rather than a question.

There is a specific flatness that comes from getting the thing you were supposed to want and feeling almost nothing when it arrives.

Not disappointment exactly.

You get the outcome, you notice you are pleased for about a day and a half, and then you notice you have already started scanning for the next item, and that the scanning is the part that feels familiar.

What I eventually worked out is that I had never really been chasing the thing.

I had been chasing the moment where somebody else confirms the thing. And confirmation has a very short half-life.

How a life gets built

The awkward thing is that none of the individual decisions were wrong.

Taking the job made sense.

Staying made sense, because I was learning and the money went up.

Specialising made sense. Years earlier, choosing medical science made sense too, and I would have argued for it properly at the time because I had built the argument myself and it was a good one.

If I am honest, it was also a field I had partly picked because it was esteemed, and then talked myself into the rest.

Every one of those held up on its own. What I never did was ask whether they held up together.

You can get extremely good at answering what makes sense without ever getting equally good at answering what you want. They use different muscles, and only one of them gets exercised very much at work, and it is not the second one.

The other thing that happens is that each sensible decision makes the next one slightly more constrained, so the range of available lives narrows without anybody announcing that it has narrowed.

At twenty-two almost everything is technically possible and almost nothing is legible. By the middle of a career it has reversed.

Everything is legible and the possible has quietly shrunk to whatever sits adjacent to what you already do.

Nobody sends you a notification about that.

You just find, at some point, that when you try to imagine a genuinely different life, the imagining itself has got harder.

When it works but doesn’t fit

A life can be financially sensible, professionally successful, stable, admired by people whose opinion you care about, and still not fit the person living inside it.

I am not making the argument that success is a trap, because I do not believe that, and I have noticed that the people who say it loudest usually have some.

The question is smaller and more uncomfortable than that.

Is the scoreboard you are currently winning on one you ever chose to play on?

Mine was other people being able to explain what I did.

I did not know that until much later, and it explains an unreasonable number of my decisions.

It explains why I picked the degree with a name. It explains why I stayed in roles a year longer than the learning lasted. I was not building anything.

I was making something other people could place.

What moving actually changed

I live in Japan now.

I quit my job and said I was going for a few months and what I remember most clearly is not the flight or the paperwork.

It was the questions.

Nobody was unkind about it and it’s worth mentioning because the version of this story where everybody is against you is a much easier one to tell.

What I got instead was, ‘what are you in Japan for.’ And, ‘why do you want to go?’ And, ‘what is it for, exactly?’

Fair enough. They are my family. They wanted to understand. Parts of me feel that they deserve to know too?

But underneath the questions was the one nobody said out loud.

Spefically: ‘Your family is here. Your life is here. Australia is amazing. Why would you move your life?’

All of that is true. Australia is amazing. My life was and is in some way still there.

None of it was wrong, and none of it changed what I wanted, which is the part I had no idea how to explain at the time.

I do not think anybody can really understand what you are going through if they have never been in the arena.

I learned that the hard way and I do not say it with any resentment, because it is just how it works.

People can love you completely and still only have their own map to read you with.

The thing that actually changed is not geographic.

I grew up keeping the peace. I was the one who made everybody comfortable, who smoothed the thing over, who read the room before she read herself. And somewhere in the middle of all this I got to a stage where I am okay with making people uncomfortable.

Their discomfort is theirs to go through. I no longer want to rescue them from it.

I think of it a bit like weather now. I put the thing out there, and people manage it the way they manage a forecast.

Some days it is sunny. Some days it rains, or it is humid, or there is a thunderstorm coming. The weather is not going to solve that for anybody.

You work out what to wear and you go outside anyway.

It took me a long time to get here.

The things I ignored

I was not unhappy, which is why this took so long.

I was, looking back, doing a lot of small things that I would now read differently.

I was more interested in other people’s lives than in my own, and specifically in people who had done something slightly irregular, and I would find myself asking them unnecessarily detailed questions about how it had actually worked.

I felt genuine relief when things got cancelled.

I kept picking up interests and not finishing them. I could describe what I did not want in considerable detail and go completely vague when asked what I did want.

And I could imagine wanting something different far more vividly than I could imagine my own life five years out, which I now think was the loudest signal of all, and the one I explained away most efficiently.

None of those are diagnoses. Plenty of contented people cancel plans.

But they were all pointing the same way for long enough that ignoring them took active work, and I was doing that work daily without once calling it that.

What have I noticed three times this year and explained away three times?

Momentum, not commitment

There is a question I did not ask for years and it is not a dramatic one.

If I came across this life today with no history in it and nothing already invested, would I pick it up?

The part of the old life I actually wanted back

Katie — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 20:02:11 GMT

Hi, I’m Katie. Welcome to Multiple Lives Theory — a place for anyone who has ever wondered: “How many lives can I live within this lifetime?”
I write about unlived lives, identity, reinvention, and what happens when the life you’ve built no longer quite fits. Essays from inside the transition, every week.

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“Do you miss your old role?”

I have been asked that one more times than any other question about the last couple of years, and I can answer it quickly.

I do not miss the job.

I have never once missed the job.

What I did not expect was how specific the thing I do miss would turn out to be.

It was never the work I had a problem with, and it was never the people.

The life around it did not match what I wanted, and that is a quieter complaint, and much harder to say out loud when somebody asks why I am leaving.

Some of the brightest people I have ever met came out of that job.

Most of them are still my friends.

What I miss

I liked bouncing an idea off somebody and having it come back a different shape.

I am genuinely interested in how other people’s brains work, in the order they put things in, in what they got curious about first and why.

If somebody has built something or pulled something off, I want the story underneath it rather than the summary of it.

I want to know their messy thought processes, the nuanced thinking, the way they describe their passions or the things they hate, I want to hear all of it.

Those conversations were probably the most stimulating part of my week and looking back, I did not think of them as a perk at the time.

I thought of them as the background.

Who decided that the best part of a job is the part nobody writes into the contract?

“It was always the people,” I said, the last time somebody asked and I have said it enough times now that it has started to sound like a rehearsed one liner.

The other thing I miss is less flattering

The structure.

Somebody else deciding when the day started.

A calendar I did not have to build.

Meetings I did not have to justify to myself.

I dictate my own time now, which is the thing I said I wanted and the thing I would not give back.

I did not think of the structure as support while I was inside it.

I took it as a constraint.

How was I meant to tell the difference from in there?

It was doing both at once, and I only found out the proportion after it was removed. Which is a bad way to find out anything.

What I got wrong

I think I assumed the people came attached to the job.

It was a useful assumption. If the good part came bundled with the bad part, then leaving was simple. I could leave the whole thing behind and not have to decide what I was actually going to miss.

Except I did miss things.

Mostly people.

That was inconvenient.

Was it ever actually all or nothing?

Probably not. It just felt easier to make it that way.

The people were portable.

Some of them came with me.

Some stayed. A few I thought I would lose and didn’t. A few I thought I would keep and, somehow, didn’t.

Nobody hands you a list when you leave a life.

There’s no box to tick for the friendships you’re allowed to carry forward, or the jokes, or the people you still want to text even though the reason you met them is gone.

I think I made the calculation quickly on purpose.

I wanted the decision to be finished.

A slower calculation would have meant admitting that I was leaving something I still loved in places. And that was harder to explain.

Especially at a dinner table, where “I left because the whole thing was wrong” is much easier to defend than “I left, but there are people from there I still care about, and some days I miss it.”

I probably needed it to be all or nothing.

It just wasn’t.

The honest version

There is still a bit of FOMO in it.

I will catch up with an old colleague and hear about a normal working week, the things they have to report on, the person they report to, the small politics of it, and I will find myself wondering what that world is like now.

Am I missing something? I do not think I am.

I ask anyway, usually on the walk home.

And then the harder one.

Sometimes I miss feeling important.

I miss being needed by a system that noticed when I was not in it.

That is probably less about the job than about something in me I only started to see properly in the day to day of working, an attachment thing I am still turning over and do not have a clean read on yet.

It is not a flattering thing to find at the bottom of a career change. I would rather the answer had been about the work, and I notice I keep trying to make it be about the work.

What going back would actually mean

If going back means the job, the answer is easy and I have given it a hundred times.

But I am not sure that is what anybody is asking.

I think the question underneath is whether I got the trade right, and the honest answer is that I got most of it right and I am still working out what to do with the rest.

I have taken some of it back already without calling it that.

I book the conversations now, on purpose, instead of waiting for them to turn up because two people happened to be in the same room at the same time.

I put a shape on the week that somebody else used to put there, badly and inconsistently, but I put it there.

Is that going backwards? It does not feel like it. It feels closer to collecting the parts that were mine and leaving the rest where it was.

So when somebody asks whether I would go back, I keep giving an answer that is technically true and not very useful.

No.

But I would take the people, and I would take some of the shape of the week and I am genuinely not sure how much of the job is left once I take both of those out of it.

What is the one part of your old life you would take back if you could take it on its own?

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The version of me who never existed

Katie — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 19:01:02 GMT

Hi, I’m Katie. Welcome to Multiple Lives Theory — a place for anyone who has ever wondered: “How many lives can I live within this lifetime?”
I write about unlived lives, identity, reinvention, and what happens when the life you’ve built no longer quite fits. Essays from inside the transition, every week.

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A few months ago I told a childhood friend I was moving abroad for a while.

Temporary, not even long.

I said I had always loved watching shows about people who do it properly, who start a life somewhere with no family nearby and no safety net, just themselves.

“It’s such brave thing to do,” I said.

She had done something like it once herself, a few month overseas, sponsored by her work.

“Yeah, for a short while” she said, and moved the conversation along like it was nothing.

I did not move the conversation along.

While she kept talking, my mind was somewhere else, running a version of my own life where I had done what she did, younger, sponsored, with none of the second-guessing.

What would that one have been like?

I realise this feeling never arrives at one big moment.

It happens in small oscillating ones.

Mid-scroll, mid-conversation, halfway through a walk I am only half paying attention to.

I will see a video of somebody speaking fluent Spanish, French or Japanese and think about the language school I never enrolled in, not for work, not for any practical reason, just because I was interested.

Or a friend posts about marathon training and I do the small useless maths.

What if I had started at twenty two instead of twenty eight?

Probably negligible, I tell myself and shrug it off. Yet I still do the maths in my head.

The language one has a specific edge to it.

I never sat down and properly learned Vietnamese growing up and there is a difference between not learning that and not choosing to learn Spanish out of interest.

One is circumstance.

The other is a door I could have walked through and did not.

Which one am I actually grieving?

I have never been able to answer that cleanly, which probably tells you something about how muddled this gets the moment I look at it straight on.

What I am actually morning is not the outcome.

I do not know that fluent Spanish or Japanese or an earlier marathon would have changed very much at all.

What I sit with for five minutes on a walk, is the other version of me who tried.

Who would she be?

That is the question underneath it, and once I let myself ask it properly it stops staying contained to the one example.

I start asking it about all of them at once.

The lived detours, the jobs I actually took and left, I have mostly made my peace with.

I can point at what they built. This is a different flavour of the same ache and it is harder to put down, because there is nothing to weigh.

No lesson the unlived version taught me.

Just the maths, and the walk, and the five minutes it takes to run it before I put my phone back in my pocket and carry on.

I have been calling it a rabbit hole, but that is not quite right either.

It is closer to thinking a few degrees deeper than the day required, and once I am there it is hard to climb back out without noticing what I am doing, which is grieving.

Not a version of myself that was taken from me.

But she feels like a version I never even reached for.

Although I am aware this is a fairly comfortable thing to grieve.

Nothing was taken. Nobody died.

I chose the things I chose and most of them were fine and there is a version of this essay that is just a well-fed person being wistful about optional languages.

I know that.

Is it even grief, or is it appetite with nowhere to put itself?

I still think the small useless maths is worth looking at, because of what it is doing rather than what it is about. But I would not want to dress it up as loss.

It is more like that curiosity that still stings a bit.

The part I do not say out loud very often

Even now, building something that is mine, working for myself where anybody can watch, I still catch myself entertaining the easier option.

Why not go and get a job at a bigger company and get sponsored to move somewhere?

It would solve the same longing in a fraction of the time, on somebody else’s budget, with somebody else deciding the terms.

I know exactly what that life costs. I have lived it. I still find myself doing the arithmetic on it anyway.

It shows up in specific, mundane places.

A job ad for a role I am overqualified for and underwhelmed by, and I read the relocation line twice before I close the tab.

A former manager posting from a new country on a visa her employer sorted out.

I notice every time…what am I actually looking for when I read the relocation line twice?

That is the part that unsettles me.

Not that I have unlived versions of myself I think about. I think everybody probably does.

It is that building the independent life has not made the grieving stop, and it has not made the easier, more sponsored version any less tempting to picture.

I thought getting out would settle the question.

But really, it just changed which version of the question I am carrying on the walk.

Which version of yourself do you keep doing the small, useless maths on?

If this resonated, these go deeper:

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The First 30 Days: A Field Guide for Building a Life Without a Boss

Katie — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 14:53:14 GMT

For the first few weeks after I stopped having a job, I kept waking up just before six.

Not at six. Just before it.

That was the time I’d trained myself to wake up so the alarm never got to be the thing that woke me. Being beaten to it felt like losing somehow.

Then there was no alarm, and nobody to beat, and my body carried on doing it anyway for about three weeks.

So I’d get up. Go for a run.

Make the same solid breakfast I’d been making for years.

Sit down at the desk by half seven with nothing on it, because nobody had put anything on it, and because I hadn’t yet worked out that putting things on it was now the job.

What was I protecting in exactly those first three weeks?

I want to be honest about what that month actually was, because I’ve since built a system for it, and the system is much tidier than the month was.

It ended up as a workbook, the fourth of these I’ve made, and it’s at the bottom of this one.

The idea underneath it is small enough to say in one line:

You don’t need certainty to move forward. You need enough evidence to take the next step.

That’s it, and it took me about a year to be able to say it that plainly.

I’m currently testing whether I actually believe it. A few weeks ago in August I got on a plane and started another one: a month in another country, with none of the excuses I had the first time.

What I hadn’t planned for was that nobody was going to tell me when the day had ended. In a job, the day ends because other people stop.

The messages slow down. Someone says they’re heading off and means it as information rather than permission, although it works as both.

Take the building away and “enough” becomes a judgement call, several times a day, with nothing pointing either way.

What is enough, on an ordinary Tuesday, when nobody is coming to tell you?

I got it wrong constantly.

Mostly, I decided I hadn’t done enough.

So I did the obvious thing: I filled the day back up.

I said yes to freelance work that came in, mostly for the paycheque, and took projects because they were offered rather than because they had much to do with what I was actually good at.

I told myself this was sensible, and some of it genuinely was.

It took me a while to notice I was charging for hours when the hours were never the part anyone wanted, and longer again to change how I quoted for things.

I turn most of that early work down now without thinking about it, and I’m still not sure whether that counts as having learned something.

What I was really doing was rebuilding a version of the job with worse pay and no colleagues, and then feeling quietly cheated that it felt like a job.

Nobody made me do that. There was no boss left to hold responsible for it.

That was the uncomfortable part, and probably the most useful information that month produced.

How long is it reasonable to keep performing a role that nobody is watching?

I kept catching myself waiting for permission long after there was nobody left to ask.

Not big things. Whether I was allowed to work in the afternoon instead of the morning, or whether a slow week counted as a bad one, or whether I had to have a reason ready in case somebody asked what I’d been doing.

I still catch the instinct to explain myself in conversations I haven’t even had yet.

Who exactly was I asking?

What I have now, which I didn’t have then, is four small moves I use when I can’t tell what to do next. Notice, name, test, adjust.

The first is paying attention to what keeps turning up.

The work that gives something back, the work that quietly takes it, and the thing I keep circling and not starting.

Then putting language on it, which sounds like the easy part. The first sentence is almost never the accurate one. Mine started as: I hate my job.

Eventually it became: I’m craving autonomy more than I’m craving a different career. A much less dramatic thing to want, and a much easier thing to test.

Testing is the smallest real version of the idea rather than the whole life.

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An afternoon of it, or one thing actually shipped, or a conversation with somebody already living the way I think I want to.

Then letting the evidence change my mind.

Sounds obvious, and it’s the one I’m the worst at.

“I thought I wanted to leave my industry, but actually I want to work independently within it” is a genuinely useful outcome. It just doesn’t feel like one at the time.

Most months, I only get as far as noticing.

The month itself has a shape too — four weeks of it and I’ve put that in the workbook.

It’s called The Month-One Operating System.

Thirteen pages, four weeks, and a page at the back that’s meant to be printed on its own and run again whenever the ground shifts. I built it in the order I wish I’d done things, rather than the order I actually did them.

The loneliness of becoming someone your old life doesn’t recognize

Katie — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 19:02:08 GMT

Hi, I’m Katie. Welcome to Multiple Lives Theory — a place for anyone who has ever wondered: “How many lives can I live within this lifetime?” I write about unlived lives, identity, reinvention, and what happens when the life you’ve built no longer quite fits.
Essays from inside the transition, every week.

Subscribe now

Last year when I left my job, my mum asked me gently, whether I’d thought about going back to university.

Do you want to study a course and then get another job?

It wasn’t a criticism.

It was the shape she reaches for whenever she isn’t sure where I’ve landed or headed.

It’s the safest sentence available to a parent who has run out of the version of me she understands.

I didn’t correct her. There wasn’t a clean way to. Nor was it in my best interest to do so…

What I’m doing now doesn’t fit inside a course or a job titleand explaining it usually makes both of us more anxious, because it sounds unstable.

Anxious for me because I have to hear myself sound unstable while I say it.

This isn’t a story about one conversation.

It’s been happening in some form since the first time I changed shape, a new business, then a new job, then quitting that job.

Every time, somebody who has known me a long time reaches for the last stable version of me they had on file.

How many times can you outgrow the same explanation before it stops feeling worth giving?

With my parents it’s the most straightforward part of this, because parents are always going to be parents.

They’re going to worry about the future whether I ask them to or not, and the worry has a language. And the language is safety.

Find a job.

Be stable.

My mum isn’t wrong. Those things are actually comforting.

She’s just describing a life I’ve already tried and left.

Is it possible to reassure someone without pretending I’m about to become a person I’m not?

Friends are a different texture entirely.

Lower stakes, because they’re changing too.

When they ask what job I want next, what role or company I want to work for, it doesn’t sting the way I’d expect it to. It reads less like judgment and more like two people trying to describe something to each other that neither of us has language for yet.

Nobody in that conversation has a finished answer, which somehow makes the not knowing easier to sit in together.

I don’t think my friends mean the question the way it lands either.

It just assumes a next role exists, because that’s still the frame most of us were handed, the idea that a life moves in a straight line from job to better job.

It’s not malicious.

It’s just the only shape the question knows how to take.

It’s old colleagues where I notice the distance most.

They knew a specific version of me, the one who showed up to that job in that year, and that’s the version they kept.

A colleague relationship has a start and an end date built into it, and once it ends, nothing updates.

They’re still advisory about it, still offering the kind of guidance you’d give someone earlier in a career they assume I’m still in.

I can tell, partway through the conversation, that they’re being kind to someone who isn’t quite in the room anymore.

What do you call it when someone is being kind to a person who doesn’t exist like that anymore?

It’s a specific kind of loneliness, being unrecognized by people who actually know you, rather than by strangers.

A stranger has no version of you to be wrong about.

These are people who watched me build the first version of this life and are still, kindly, addressing that person.

There’s a particular kind of distance that opens up in those moments.

Quiet, not dramatic.

Not a fight, not a falling out.

Just the private recognition that this person doesn’t actually know who I am right now, and there isn’t a version of the conversation where I can fix that in the time we have.

People update their picture of you when they update it.

You can’t do the update for them, no matter how well you explain it.

I used to think I owed people the corrected version.

That if I explained it well enough they’d catch up.

I’ve mostly stopped trying. Not out of resentment. But more out of running the numbers.

The amount of energy it takes to update someone else’s idea of you rarely matches what you get back for the effort.

What I do instead, most days, is smaller than that.

I show up for myself however I can manage that day, and let the explaining wait.

It isn’t a system. Some days it’s just choosing not to spend the phone call defending a decision I’ve already made.

Other days it’s not correcting a colleague mid sentence because the correction would take longer than the conversation has left in it.

Is it possible to feel completely certain about a decision and still feel unmoored by how few people can see it the way you do?

So I still answer when my mum asks about uni.

I still tell old colleagues something close to the truth and watch them nod at a version of it that isn’t quite what I said.

I’ve made a kind of peace with being partly unknown to the people who’ve known me the longest, though I’m not sure peace is the right word for it.

It’s closer to a low, ongoing hum I’ve learned to work alongside.

Most days I don’t notice it. Other days, like the day she asked about uni, I notice all of it at once.

Who in your life is still talking to a version of you that hasn’t existed for a while?

If this landed, send it to somebody who is quietly being someone new around people who haven’t caught up yet.

If this landed, these go deeper:

✍️ New here?

🍀 Multiple Lives Theory is for people in the in-between, when the life you’ve built no longer quite fits, but the next one hasn’t taken shape yet.

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The years I thought I wasted were doing something

Katie — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 19:01:28 GMT

Hi, I’m Katie. Welcome to Multiple Lives Theory — a place for anyone who has ever wondered: “How many lives can I live within this lifetime?”
I write about unlived lives, identity, reinvention, and what happens when the life you’ve built no longer quite fits.
Essays from inside the transition, every week.

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A quieter one today, about the sentence I hand people at parties instead of the actual years.

At parties, at networking things, at birthday dinners, I’ve got it down to one line.

The shift out of medical research, the hustle years in tech, the businesses I built after the 9 to 5, all of it folded into a single sentence, delivered with a smile, and then, before anyone has a chance to actually respond to it, I add but I’m doing okay, just in case the sentence on its own sounded like it needed rescuing.

I’ve said some version of that line often enough that I don’t really hear myself say it anymore, which is probably the actual problem, if I’m honest, more than anything about the years themselves.

What would actually happen if I let the sentence run long at an actual party?

There are two stretches I do this to most.

The first is the run of months between roles when I’d tell people I was “taking some time to figure out next steps.”

What I was actually doing was hunting for the next business idea instead of resting, picking up ghostwriting and copywriting outside my own field because it paid.

And at one point landing a six-month contract at a health and wellness startup in Australia that never fit, in a role where part of the commute was a ferry…

The second is the years I spent chasing titles and a six-figure salary because I wanted to feel seen. I got both, eventually, and neither one did what I was expecting it to do.

Both of them get the same treatment. A clause each, if that, and then I move on before anyone can ask a second question.

Making the tidy version

I don’t think I’m lying, exactly, when I compress it like that. Everything in the one line is true.

But compression isn’t neutral, and I think that’s the part that took me a while to notice.

Every time I shrink those years into a sentence I’m also choosing, without quite deciding to, what gets left standing and what gets cut, and what gets cut tends to be the same things every time, the actual weight of it, the parts that would take longer than a party allows.

What would the room actually do with the real weight of it, if I handed it over instead?

I do it, I think, because the tidy version is easier to hand to somebody who asked a casual question and is expecting a casual answer.

Nobody at a birthday dinner wants the long version, or so I’ve assumed, maybe wrongly, and the smile at the end is doing a specific job too.

It’s telling the room the sentence is over and everyone can relax now, including me.

What gets cut is always the useful part

The gig-hopping years built a specific kind of adaptability.

I got fast at walking into a role I hadn’t fully vetted and finding the one useful thing to take from it before I left, a habit I still use now, of looking at whatever’s actually in front of me and asking what could be improved instead of waiting for the ideal setup.

The title-chasing years built less of a skill and more of a fact I needed to learn about myself the expensive way: that a bigger title doesn’t quiet the part of me that’s still asking what’s next.

I don’t think I’d believe that if I hadn’t spent a few years proving it firsthand.

Neither of those fits in a clause, which is exactly why neither of them makes it into the sentence. The tidy version keeps the timeline and throws away the evidence.

Would either of those sound like an achievement if I said it out loud instead of folding it into one line?

But I’m doing okay

That line, the one I tack on at the end, is maybe the part I’d most like to look at honestly.

It’s not untrue, I generally am doing okay, but I notice I say it fast, before anyone can ask a follow-up, which suggests it’s less a statement of fact and more a way of closing a door I don’t actually want opened at a party.

Somebody did once ask me about one of those years directly, and it went differently to how I expected.

It was an interviewer at a company I eventually joined.

My CV showed the pattern, a role every year and a half or two, and she asked about it the way people usually do, as a vetting question, checking whether I’d actually stay this time.

I told her the true version.

Most of those had been contract roles that ended on schedule, and the ones that weren’t, I’d left because the company had gone repetitive and monotonous, no more room in it, and I was ready for something with more depth.

She didn’t file it as a red flag.

She said she could tell I was ready for something more substantial, and moved to the next question like I’d passed rather than explained myself out of a hole.

I’ve thought about that exchange more than the interview probably warranted, mostly because it was the first time the true version got me a better result than the tidy one would have.

Would the tidy version have gotten the same answer from her, or only the true one did?

I think what I’m actually doing, across all of this, is narrating my own history the way you’d clean the house before someone visits; quickly, instinctively, moving the obviously messy things out of sight rather than actually dealing with any of them.

The years themselves aren’t the detour. The tidying is a habit I picked up somewhere along the way, and I’m not sure when, exactly, it started running automatically.

There is one I’m still slightly embarrassed by, though embarrassed isn’t quite it.

It’s closer to regret.

How long does regret get to run before it’s allowed to just be information instead?

The years I spent taking whatever role paid the most without checking the team, the culture, or what the actual day to day would be like.

I had what I’d call ‘shiny object syndrome’, watching what people around me were doing and adjusting to match rather than trusting my own read on a situation.

One of those decisions put me in that toxic health and wellness contract, the one with the ferry commute. I said yes to it inside a week.

Which is probably its own answer. The compressing was never really about the party. It was about the version of me who used to say yes before she’d actually looked.

I’d like to get better at leaving the sentence open, at some point, at the actual risk of a follow-up question. I haven’t managed it yet, not reliably.

What’s the actual risk, if I let someone ask the second question? Mostly I still hear the smile arrive before I’ve decided to send it.

Which years do you skip or compress at a party, and what words do you use to shrink them?

If this landed, send it to somebody who’s got their own one-line, smile-shaped version of a much longer story.

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The version of me who wanted something slower

Katie — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 19:01:04 GMT

Hi, I’m Katie. Welcome to Multiple Lives Theory — a place for anyone who has ever wondered: “How many lives can I live within this lifetime?”
I write about unlived lives, identity, reinvention, and what happens when the life you’ve built no longer quite fits.
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For a long stretch of my life, the first thing I did every morning was open a diary and write down three deliverables.

Not one list.

Three.

One for each area I was running at the same time: the corporate role, the business I was building on the side, and whatever I’d decided that week counted as looking after myself.

Most days I did this before I’d had a coffee, some days before I was properly awake.

I didn’t think of it as unusual.

It was just how the day started, the way other people check their phones.

Three lines decided whether the day had gone well by the time I lay back down and did it again the next morning.

What was that actually measuring?

Not much, looking back. It measured whether I’d kept pace.

It never asked if the work meant anything that day, or whether I’d spoken to anyone who wasn’t a colleague or a client. It only asked whether the three boxes were ticked.

I’ve been trying to work out what I actually wanted underneath all of it, and the honest answer is smaller than I expected.

I didn’t want to achieve less.

I wanted the time I spent on things to be on purpose instead of raced through so I could get to the next line. Intentional, not idle.

I used to talk about those two as if they were the same thing.

There’s a version of envy I’ve never said out loud until now.

It wasn’t the people with the bigger job or the better outcome I envied. It was the ones who seemed content with an ordinary nine to five.

From where I stood, they looked settled. Not thrilled, not underachieving, just fine with it.

I couldn’t work out how anyone got to fine.

Was there ever a day it would have been enough to just be fine, the way they seemed to be?

I had the promotions. I had, by most measures, a good salary and a title people recognised on sight.

None of it did what I thought it would, which was let me stop looking for the next thing. I’d get one answer and need a better one within the week.

Nobody sat me down and told me to be like this.

It arrived early and quietly, from a primary school teacher, then a high school one, then the ordinary drift of a family that wanted the best for me and said so in the language of achievement, because that was the language everyone around us used.

A version of adulthood got handed to me before I was old enough to ask where it came from.

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It wasn’t cruel and it wasn’t even wrong, most of it.

A teacher telling a nine-year-old she was bright and should aim higher is not a crime.

It’s just that nobody was ever going to circle back later and check whether the aiming higher was still mine by the time I was thirty.

What would I have written down at nine, if anyone had thought to ask what I wanted instead of what I was good at?

What it turned into, practically, was needing something to say.

At work, at a dinner, on a call home, someone would ask how things were going, and I’d feel the pull to have an answer that sounded worth their asking.

Not a status update.

Evidence.

I spent a chunk of my twenties collecting things to say out loud in that exact ordinary moment.

How much of what I chased in that decade was actually mine, and how much was just something I could report on without flinching?

I don’t think I was being dishonest about it, exactly. I believed the trophies were the goal.

It’s only from here I can see them as a stand in for something I didn’t think I was allowed to just have, which was being okay without one.

I still open a document most mornings.

It doesn’t have three deliverables in it anymore, or it does on some days and I let it not on others.

I haven’t fully worked out what replaced the version of me who needed a full inbox to feel like the day had counted.

Some mornings the document just has one line in it: what actually mattered today.

Most mornings I still can’t answer that without circling back to something I did, which probably means I’m not finished with this yet, not that I’ve solved it.

I’m not sure I’d recognise her if I saw her now. I’m less sure she’d recognise this.

What would you have to stop reporting on before you found out what you actually wanted?

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Before I changed my life, I changed my weeks

Katie — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 12:01:49 GMT

Hi, I’m Katie. Welcome to Multiple Lives Theory — a place for anyone who has ever wondered: “How many lives can I live within this lifetime?”
I write about unlived lives, identity, reinvention, and what happens when the life you’ve built no longer quite fits. This one’s for paid subscribers.

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If I had to guess what people expect from a title like this, it’s a list of morning routines that somehow bought me my freedom.

I want to correct that before you get three lines in, because it’s the whole point of what follows.

Freedom didn’t arrive the day I quit.

It had been building for two or three years before that, quietly, while I still had the job, the title, the calendar full of other people’s meetings.

What follows isn’t a list of things that gave me more free time.

It’s the record of what was already true about my week, long before I had the nerve to act on any of it.

1. Protected time

I gave my future self protected time.

I built recurring blocks into the week for the things I actually wanted to explore, rather than waiting for some future version of my calendar that had more room in it.

That version doesn’t arrive on its own. I put the block in before the reason for it existed, not after.

2. The running list – A FOREVER TDL

I kept a running list of possible lives.

Living somewhere else.
Studying something with no relationship to my actual job.
Making something.
Run an e-commerce store
Build digital products
Swim with turtles
Learn how to make a croissant

Or changing careers entirely.

Whenever one of these showed up, I wrote it down without immediately auditioning it for realism.

Most ideas don’t survive being asked is this actually feasible in the first thirty seconds.

I stopped asking that question at the point of capture, and asked it later, if at all.

How many of those ideas would have survived being said out loud in a meeting?

3. Small experiments instead of big fantasies

How do you know what you actually want?

Katie — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 19:00:54 GMT

Hi, I’m Katie. Welcome to Multiple Lives Theory, a place for anyone who has ever wondered: “How many lives can I live within this lifetime?” . I write about unlived lives, identity, reinvention, and what happens when the life you’ve built no longer quite fits.
Essays from inside the transition, every week

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For a stretch of months, I woke up with a puffy face.

It’s the least dignified way to open an essay, and it’s the most accurate one I’ve got.

High cortisol does something to your face overnight. I could see it before I’d said a word to anyone. I’d look in the mirror and register it the way I’d register weather.

Right. That again.

I’d just finished two businesses and left a high-stress, high-performing role. People talk about those things as if they’re the same thing. They aren’t.

What I had instead of a job was noise.

Emails. Socials. Messages.

Then there were the messages you get when you’ve just stopped doing something.

People ask how it’s going, warmly and genuinely, and every one of them requires an answer you don’t have yet.

So I did what most usually do.

I scrolled. Texted friends for no reason. Got up for snacks I wasn’t hungry for.

Small hits of something, close enough together that there was never much time for an actual thought to land.

I think that was part of the problem.

I’d spent years being busy, productive, responsive, always moving towards something. I hadn’t noticed how little space I’d left to ask whether I actually wanted any of it.

Then I sat down.

Not on a walk. I want to be specific about that because the difference matters.

I sat at a desk with a journal and my life planner open and wrote down what I wanted.

Although it sounds like a small, slightly cute activity, it really wasn’t.

It was horrible.

Because the first things that came out weren’t what I wanted. They were things I’d absorbed.

I’d write something down, look at it, and have this delayed little recognition.

Wait.

That’s what they said.

That’s what this person said.

That’s what I’ve been told is sensible.

That doesn’t mean I want it.

Once I noticed this happening, I started seeing it everywhere. A good career was supposed to look a certain way.

Success was supposed to mean certain things.

A stable life was supposed to arrive in a particular order.

There were things I was supposed to be ambitious about. Things I was supposed to have figured out by a certain age.

None of these ideas were necessarily bad.

That’s what made them hard to question.

Some were useful. Some were true for me. Some I still believe.

I just couldn’t tell the difference anymore between something I genuinely wanted and something I’d learned was worth wanting.

The pebbles

The picture I keep coming back to is pebbles in a backpack.

I picked them up over years.

A teacher’s idea of what I was good at.
A parent’s idea of what counted as stable.
A friend’s idea of what a good life looked like.
A culture’s idea of what success should look like by thirty.

Nobody hands you a pebble and says, ‘This is a rock. Please carry it.’

They say something at dinner and in it goes.

You watch someone else’s life and think, That’s what I should be doing.

You get praised for being good at something and quietly turn it into an identity.

You see someone succeed and decide that whatever got them there must be something you should want too.

Then one day you’re climbing with a backpack full of things you never chose to pack.

The weight isn’t dramatic.

It’s just always there. I don’t know how else I would have noticed it.

The pebbles didn’t fall out all at once. They came out slowly, one at a time, mostly at that desk.

What I’m not going to call it

There’s a word people use for this, and I’m not going to use it.

I wouldn’t say this is shadow work. I don’t know what that is.

I don’t want to reach for a term I haven’t earned just because it makes the experience sound more coherent.

So I don’t have a name for it.

I’ve got a desk, a planner, and a slow process of working out which parts of my life I actually chose.

I used to think figuring out what I wanted would feel like discovering some buried answer that had been waiting for me.

It didn’t.

It was much less glamorous.

It was noticing.

I don’t actually care about this as much as I thought I did.

I thought I wanted this because I thought it meant I was successful.

I like the idea of this more than I like doing it.

I genuinely want this, even though I can’t explain why.

That last one was the strange one.

The things that felt most like mine weren’t always the things I could defend with a good argument.

Sometimes they were just the things I kept coming back to.

How do I tell the difference?

I still don’t have a perfect test.

But I’ve started noticing a few things.

One is how much explaining I need to do.

There are opinions I’ve held for a decade that I can’t trace. I catch one occasionally, and it’s usually because I’m defending it too hard.

That’s a tell.

When something is genuinely mine, I don’t seem to need to win the conversation about it.

Another is what happens when you remove the audience.

Would I still want this if nobody knew I had it?
Would I still choose this career if it didn’t sound impressive when I explained it?
Would I still want this lifestyle if I couldn’t post about it?
Would I still pursue this thing if there were no obvious way to turn it into a success story?

Those questions have been useful.

Because sometimes what I wanted wasn’t the thing itself. It was what I thought the thing would say about me.

I wanted the work. I didn’t necessarily want the title.

I wanted the freedom. I didn’t necessarily want the version of success that came with it.

I wanted to make things. I didn’t necessarily want to build a business around every interest I had.

Once I separated those things, it got easier to hear myself.

The problem with asking yourself what you want

Maybe ‘what do I want?’ is sometimes too big a question. Especially when you’ve spent years being very good at wanting the right things.

The smaller questions have been more useful to me.

What do I actually enjoy?
What am I curious about when nobody is asking me to be?
What do I keep returning to?
What feels lighter when I imagine doing it?
What would I choose if I didn’t have to justify the choice?

I don’t think these questions reveal your life’s purpose. I’m suspicious of anything that promises that.

They just give you something to pay attention to. And that’s where I’ve found the answer starts.

Not with some dramatic revelation. With noticing what remains when you stop performing an answer you’ve already been given.

The sorting isn’t finished

I’m in my thirties now, and a lot of what I was taught was the right way is turning out to have been somebody else’s preference, handed down with a straight face.

Some of it I’m keeping.

I haven’t worked out which yet, and I’m no longer sure that’s a problem.

Maybe knowing what you want is less like discovering yourself and more like editing your life.

You notice something you’ve been carrying. You turn it over.

You ask where it came from. You decide whether you still want it.

Sometimes you put it back in the bag. Sometimes you leave it on the ground.

And occasionally, underneath all the noise, you find something that was yours all along.

That’s the closest I’ve got to an answer.

You know what you actually want by giving yourself enough quiet to notice what you’d still choose when nobody else is choosing for you.

Then you keep asking.

What’s something you’ve wanted for years that you’re no longer sure you actually want?

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What if you could test your next life before you committed to it?

Katie — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 06:31:23 GMT

I spent a long time thinking I had a consistency problem.

I couldn’t keep a streak going for longer than a few weeks. Some people can do the same thing every day for a year. I’ve just never been one of them.

I’d start the habit tracker. Get excited about the new routine. Make it to day 12 or 17 or, if I was feeling particularly disciplined, somewhere in the twenties.

Then I’d miss a day.

And somehow one missed day became evidence that the whole thing wasn’t working.

What I didn’t notice for a long time was that I was actually pretty good at trying things.

Nine of them, on and off, over the two or three years before I eventually left.

Some mornings, I’d sit with tea and a diary before the 9 to 5 started.

Not because it was productive, but because it was the one part of the day nobody else had scheduled.

Some experiments lasted a month.

Some lasted a week.

Some disappeared completely, then came back months later in a different shape.

I cold-messaged business owners for coffee with no pitch prepared.

I tested tools I didn’t understand yet.

I broke things inside free trials on purpose.

I followed ideas that sounded slightly ridiculous when I tried to explain them to someone else.

If I’d tried to track any of this as a habit, I probably would have quit by week three.

But I wasn’t really trying to build habits.

I was collecting evidence.

That distinction changed the way I thought about my life.

A habit tracker asks: Did you do the thing today?

An experiment asks: What did the thing tell you?

Those are very different questions.

A habit tracker treats a missed day as a break in the chain.

An experiment treats it as information.

Maybe I was tired.

Maybe I hated the thing.

Maybe the timing was wrong.

Maybe I liked the idea of it more than I liked actually doing it.

None of those answers is particularly dramatic.

They’re also useful.

And over time, the small pieces of information started adding up.

None of the nine experiments looked like much written down.

Ten minutes with a journal doesn’t look like a career pivot.

One coffee with a stranger doesn’t look like a new professional network.

Breaking a tool during a free trial doesn’t look like the beginning of a different kind of work.

But that was never really the point.

I wasn’t trying to prove, in advance, that any of these things would become my next life.

I was trying to find out what happened when I gave them a little room to exist.

Some things became useful.

Some didn’t.

Some surprised me.

Some confirmed things I already suspected but hadn’t wanted to admit.

And a few kept pulling me back.

That became much more interesting to me than whether I could maintain a perfect streak.

Because when you’re trying to figure out what comes next, I don’t think you always need more discipline.

Sometimes you need more evidence.

You can spend months trying to decide whether you’d like a different kind of work, a different routine, a different creative practice, a different way of spending your time.

Or you can run a small experiment and see.

Not commit.

Not quit your job.

Not announce your reinvention to everyone you know. Just try the thing for long enough to learn something about yourself.

That’s what eventually became the Independent Life Experiment.

Being obsessed with designing digital products and tools, I naturally approached this as something that could be designed to.

I built the full version as a 30-day experiment because I wanted enough time to collect real evidence, but a short enough window that it didn’t require me to make a life-changing decision first.

Thirty days won’t tell you everything.

It might, however, tell you more than one particularly good Tuesday.

THE INDEPENDENT LIFE EXPERIMENT · TOOL Nº 03

I turned the framework into a 14-page companion workbook you can actually run.

It takes you through three phases of the experiment, gives you a work page for each of the nine areas I’ve been testing, and gives you a place to record what you actually did, what happened, and what you learned.

There’s also a re-run tracker, because sometimes the first experiment isn’t the end of the question.

It’s just the first piece of evidence.

The Independent Life Experiment lives in the Reinvention Library, and it’s included for paid subscribers.

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I didn’t hate my job. I just didn’t want that life anymore.

Katie — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 19:06:38 GMT

Hi, I’m Katie! Welcome to Multiple Lives Theory — a place for anyone who has ever wondered, “How many lives can I live within this lifetime?”
I write about unlived lives, identity, reinvention, and the messy process of becoming someone new. Essays from inside the transition, weekly.

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I told my family over FaceTime, because of distance and convenience.

That’s the detail I keep going back to. Not the decision, which I’d made weeks earlier and had been carrying around like something in a coat pocket. The screen. A life change delivered to faces in a grid, at whatever hour it happened to be where they were, with that half-second lag that makes everyone talk over each other at the start.

My friends took about four seconds. Most of them I have known since high school or university, and they backed me out of what I can only describe as loving insanity. I said I was doing it and they said good, and there were no questions attached to it.

My mother was the one I paid more attention to.

She has always been an advocate for stability. As long as there is a payslip it does not much matter who you work for, you grind it out. So when I told her, I saw her face go, slowly, the way a face goes on a screen when there is nothing else in the frame to look at.

The mouth settled first. Then she asked what I was going to do. Then, after a pause I have thought about more than the rest of the call, she said okay. As long as you know what you’re doing.

The colleagues ran on a different current altogether. Corporate stress energy, immediate and practical. What are you going to do now. Where are you going to find a job. They offered help and they meant it, and I noticed even at the time that it was a completely different question to the one my friends had not bothered asking.

Some people looked at it and saw the freedom.

Some people looked at it and saw the missing safety net.

Nobody was wrong, exactly.

They were looking at different halves of the same thing.

What’s the right hour to say something like that, when there isn’t one anywhere?

I told my friends at somebody’s birthday, which I also hadn’t planned.

It came up the way things come up at those, in the gap between one conversation and the next, and then it was out and I was answering questions about my future whilst somebody was cutting a cake.

Neither of those was a moment I chose. I think that’s probably normal and I hadn’t expected it. You rehearse the announcement and then it turns up sideways.

Everyone’s case was good

Here’s the part that made it hard, and it isn’t the part I thought would be hard.

Nobody was wrong.

How was I meant to argue with people who were right?

My family were hesitant, and the hesitance came from care. They want my career to be secure. They want to know I’ll be okay. That’s the entire content of it, and when I take out how it landed on me at the time, I have real trouble finding anything in there to object to.

My friends asked what’s next. What’s your future going to look like. What will you be doing. Different people, different stakes, and all of them fair questions to put to someone who has just put down a thing that was working.

And underneath all of it was the same argument, which I would make myself if I were sitting on their side of the screen. Security. Building a future. Family. And the plain fact that we do need money to fuel a life, that capital is what buys the version of it you actually want, and that walking away from a reliable source of it is not a small move.

I didn’t have a counterargument. I still don’t have a good one. I had a feeling, and a feeling holds up badly against a well-constructed case about your own future.

Fine is the hardest thing to leave

The leaving stories we get handed all come with a villain in them.

A boss. A culture. A moment where somebody said the unforgivable thing and you walked out.

Those stories are satisfying because they do the justifying for you.

You never have to explain the leaving, the story explains it.

I didn’t have one of those. I had a job that was, by every measure anybody around me was using, good.

What was I supposed to submit as evidence?

So leaving it needed a justification I couldn’t produce on demand.

Every conversation turned into a small hearing where I was expected to present evidence, and the only evidence I had was that I’d stopped wanting it, which isn’t admissible anywhere.

What I was actually chasing

I’d got everything I set out to get. The career. The business that worked.

The title in tech that made people’s eyebrows move when I said it.

What I hadn’t clocked until much later is how much of the getting was driven by FOMO.

Not ambition exactly, and not a plan either.

Just a persistent low-grade worry about being left behind, and a habit of reaching for whatever the next visible thing was so the worry would go quiet for a bit.

Which it did.

And then I’d arrive, and the feeling on arrival was never satisfaction. It was what’s next.

Was any of that actually mine, or had I just been running from something?

I’m coming into my early thirties now and I’d like the second half of my working life to have more in it than the first.

More surface area, is how I keep saying it to myself. More exposure to opportunity, to experiences, to joy, to being somewhere I’ve never been and being bad at it for a while.

You can’t build that out of not wanting to be left behind. Or I couldn’t.

Surveillance, and then not

For a long time I heard all of those questions as surveillance.

What’s next felt like an audit.

What will you be doing felt like somebody checking whether I’d made a mistake yet so they could file it away.

I’d go into those conversations with a defence already prepared and come out depleted, having spent an evening proving something to people who weren’t actually prosecuting me.

Were they ever actually asking, or was I answering a question nobody had put?

I don’t hear it that way anymore.

Same questions. Same people.

What changed is me, and I’m suspicious of how tidy that sounds, so let me be specific about what actually shifted.

Somewhere in the last few months of working for myself I stopped needing them to agree.

Not in a triumphant way. It was more that arguing turned out to be expensive, and there’s only so much of that particular energy in a day.

And spending it debating someone who loves me and is worried about me started to feel like a bad allocation.

They were caring. They were always caring. It just arrived in the shape of a question, and I’d been reading the shape instead of the thing inside it.

I don’t have a test for this

I don’t want to make that sound like a technique, because when I try to use it as one it stops working.

There are still days I walk in with the defence prepared.

There are conversations where I can hear the care perfectly well and get annoyed by it anyway, because being cared about and being doubted can arrive in identical sentences and I don’t always have the patience to sort them.

And I suspect if the money stopped working, if the numbers went bad for a few months, I’d hear surveillance again immediately.

Whatever generosity I’m describing here is at least partly funded by things going okay.

Is that patience, or is it just what having enough money in the account looks like?

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So I don’t have a test for when fine stops being enough.

I was half hoping one would turn up whilst I wrote this and it hasn’t.

What I’ve got is smaller than a test.

The case for staying was good, and it stayed good the whole way through, and I left anyway.

Those two things sat next to each other for months before I did anything about it, and they’re still sitting next to each other now.

What was the good case somebody made for you staying, and what did you say back? If this landed, send it to somebody who is trying to explain a decision that doesn’t have a villain in it.

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The Multiple Lives Theory

Going back isn’t always going backwards

The short version: going back to something you left can be a retreat or a return. From the outside they look the same. The difference, as far as I can tell, is whether you can say what you’re going back for.

If I can say what I’m going back for, it’s probably a return. If all I can say is that this is hard, I’m less sure.

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How Do You Know What’s Worth Giving Up?

The number I kept checking

The cost that had no number

Two columns

Try the two-column audit

What mine looked like

I’m outgrowing a version of me I used to hate

The short version: a pull toward my old life tells me what that life used to give me. It tells me less than I feared about where I’m meant to be.

If you’ve felt the same pull, what do you think yours was asking for?

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What If You Regret the Life You Chose?

Why the word didn’t fit

Three things that get called regret

How to tell which one you have

Why we’d rather have made a mistake

What regret is evidence of

I ticked everything off the list and felt nothing

You were building.

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The Three Lives Board: Explore Multiple Paths Without Choosing Just One

The page that became the board

The life I know, the life I imagine, the life I can’t picture

What I built, because one page could not hold it

I moved to Japan for a life I thought I’d missed

It was the radical freedom of being a stranger.

What is the life you decided you had missed, and if you got some version of it now, would you actually want the one you imagined then?

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I knew what I didn’t want to lose. I just didn’t know what I wanted.

I became fluent in the questions

I had detailed opinions about risk

Safety came with a lever

The part I didn’t expect

What I am still learning to ask

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I was tired for three years

The explanation

Being correctly informed

What I was actually asking for

The reframe isn’t the fix

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What If the Life You're Building Isn't the Life You Want?

A year of thinking

Nothing had gone wrong

How a life gets built

When it works but doesn’t fit

Is the scoreboard you are currently winning on one you ever chose to play on?

What moving actually changed

It was the questions.

The things I ignored

Momentum, not commitment

The part of the old life I actually wanted back

What I miss

The other thing I miss is less flattering

What I got wrong

Nobody hands you a list when you leave a life.

The honest version

What going back would actually mean

If this resonated, these go deeper:

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The version of me who never existed

What would that one have been like?

Which one am I actually grieving?

Who would she be?

But she feels like a version I never even reached for.

The part I do not say out loud very often

Which version of yourself do you keep doing the small, useless maths on?

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The First 30 Days: A Field Guide for Building a Life Without a Boss

What was I protecting in exactly those first three weeks?

How long is it reasonable to keep performing a role that nobody is watching?

Who exactly was I asking?

The loneliness of becoming someone your old life doesn’t recognize