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?” Multiple Lives Theory helps you make sense of the in-between, rethink the idea that you have to live one prescribed life, and experiment with what comes next.
I write about unlived lives, identity, reinvention, and the messy process of becoming someone new. Essays from inside the transition, weekly.
The realization didn’t arrive all at once. There was no single afternoon, no dramatic pause on a street corner to anchor the story to. There was just the walking…
There’s just a stretch of about six months where I’d get out and go, and somewhere in there the same question would arrive. What am I actually doing?
It never turned up at my desk. At my desk I was fine, or I was busy, which I’d more or less stopped being able to tell apart. It seemed to need the conditions. No deliverables, no notifications, nobody to be responsive for. Not journaling either, because journaling is still a task with a page to fill. Just me and a footpath and forty minutes, and the thought would come up louder than I’d ever let it get indoors.
And every time it came up, I answered it with a list.
It’s a good job.
I’m getting paid.
It’s secure.
It’s a salary I can’t argue with.
There are promotions along the way.
I’m making an impact.
I’m working with worldwide markets….
What was I meant to do with a list where every line on it was true?
I could run that whole list in about four seconds.
I’d run it, and the question would go quiet for a while, and I took the quiet as proof the list had worked. I think what was probably happening is that the list was correct and it still wasn’t an answer, and it took me a long time to notice those are two different things.
And the part I still can’t get around is that every item on that list is true. I’d probably still say most of it if somebody asked me now, which is maybe why it took as long as it did, because there was nothing in the list to argue with and I kept taking that to mean there was nothing to argue with.
What the six months actually looked like
There’d been a restructure. I stayed through it, and then I stayed after it, and then I kept staying for about six months whilst the question got louder on the walks and stayed quiet everywhere else.
Was I waiting for it to get worse? I think I might have been.
At the same time I was running an e-commerce business at night and training for a marathon.
I’ve typed that sentence a few times now and it keeps coming out sounding like a brag, which isn’t what I mean by it. It’s just what was in the calendar. The job, the business, the training, and forty minutes somewhere in there where the whole arrangement would come apart a bit and then more or less reassemble itself by the time I got home.
The commute did the same job. I was working from home a lot by then, so going in had turned into an event rather than a default, and the trains and the metros gave me the same conditions the footpath did. Nothing to produce. Nobody expecting a response for half an hour. And there it was again.
Misery needs a reason, or it comes looking for you
What I understood much later, and only in hindsight, is that misery with a reason attached is almost manageable.
You can point at the thing. You can say it out loud at dinner and watch somebody nod. You can decide whether to fix it or leave it, and either way you’re doing something about it.
What was I going to complain about, exactly?
Misery with nothing to point at won’t give you any of that. There’s no incident, no villain, no line in a contract you could show someone. So it just sits there next to you, and after a while, probably longer than I’d want to put in writing, you stop looking for what’s wrong with the job and start looking for what’s wrong with you.
Is that the bit nobody warns you about, or did everybody else already know?
That’s the actual damage, I think.
Not the job but the slow arrival at the idea that you must be the faulty part, because everything else checks out.
The thing about my brain I still don’t have language for
I don’t know why I dragged it out.
I’ve got a few theories and I don’t fully believe any of them. One is that I’m a millennial and we were trained fairly thoroughly to stay, to be grateful, to treat a secure job as something you don’t put down without a better one already in your hand.
Another is that I didn’t trust my own read on it, because I’d never really had to, because up until then, the things I was good at and the things I was meant to be doing had happened to be the same things.
There’s a third one and I’m still working out how to say it. My brain has never done well with one lane…
It goes wide, it wants a few things running at once, and it gets restless in a way that reads as distraction from the outside and feels like oxygen from the inside.
I spent a long time treating that as a fault to manage. I’m not sure anymore that it is one. I’m also not sure it explains anything, and I’d rather say that than pretend I’ve landed it.
Some people don’t need any of this. They get a feeling, they trust it, they go.
I’ve met them. But I’m not one of them, and I don’t think it says anything good about me that I had to go most of the way to the bottom of something before I’d believe my own read on it.
Do you have to feel it in your body first, or do some people just know?
The restructure came and went and I stayed.
I’d like to say that I knew, on those walks, and was quietly building towards something.
I don’t think that’s true.
I think I knew there was a question, and I kept answering it with the list, and the list kept working for about four days at a time.
Was I hoping somebody would come along and decide it for me?
What I had at the end of those six months wasn’t a decision.
It was just a growing suspicion that the quiet after the list had never actually been agreement.
If a job has ever looked right on paper and felt wrong anyway, what was the list you used to answer yourself with?
If this landed, send it to somebody who is doing well on paper and can’t explain why that isn’t the same as doing well.
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