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.
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.
