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.
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?
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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This made me think about my own career pivots. I started in civilian aviation, moved into military aviation partly because someone told me I couldn't do something and apparently spite is a perfectly adequate source of career motivation, and then eventually walked away from aviation entirely.
That last pivot was probably the strangest. I'd spent years building experience in something I was objectively good at. There wasn't necessarily a clean villain or a single event that made leaving make sense to everyone else. I didn't want my aviation history to obligate my future.
Sometimes I think we confuse being capable of continuing down a path with evidence that we should.
What a great piece. Love this.