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.
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.
Here are the seven, as I actually lived them, not as I’d sell them.
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?
