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
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?
If this landed, send it to someone who’s in the middle of working out what they actually think.
If this landed, these go deeper:
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Written from inside the transition, not the other side.