I knew what I didn’t want to lose. I just didn’t know what I wanted.

I spent years getting better at protecting my life. I didn’t spend nearly as much time deciding what I wanted it for.

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 most of my working life I made my decisions around safety. Or should I say safety made the decisions for me.

Not ambition. Although from the outside it probably looked like ambition.

I took the salary I couldn’t say no to.

I bought a house. I went for the promotion which was worth another $10,000 a year.

I started many micro-businesses on top of the job, partly because I wanted the extra money and partly because I wanted the skills.

Yet both of those turned out to be the same answer wearing different clothes.

Everything was a hedge against something. There was a stretch where I wanted to stop.

Not dramatically. I wanted a few months of not being anybody’s anything.

Instead, I went back to work because my family was going through a hard patch and going back was the most obvious and secure thing to do.

I look back and I don’t tell that story as a sacrifice. It genuinely didn’t feel like the best decision at the time.

I became fluent in the questions

“You need something to fall back on.”

Some version of that sentence has been said to me by nearly everybody in my family, about nearly every choice I’ve made.

“Is it stable?”

I’ve been asked that about every job I’ve ever taken, about the business, and I still get asked it.

Is it permanent?

What happens if?

I don’t think this is unusual.

I think this is what happens in families where money was never a given. You inherit a way of thinking about the world without necessarily inheriting the awareness that you’ve inherited it.

Nobody sat me down and told me to be careful. I somehow picked it up along the way and became fluent in being careful.

For a long time, I thought I was a cautious person by temperament.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to consider that I might simply be repeating a household.

The strange thing about inherited beliefs is that they rarely announce themselves as beliefs.

They sound like judgement.

They sound like common sense.

They sound like you.

I had detailed opinions about risk

I could tell you exactly what I was protecting.

• The salary.

• The mortgage.

• The fallback.

• The skills.

• The future version of me who might regret having given something up.

I had detailed opinions about risk.

What I had surprisingly little detail on was what I actually wanted my days to look like.

Not my life.

My days.

I had a very good answer for what I didn’t want to lose, and almost no answer for what I wanted to gain.

Ask me what I wanted a Wednesday afternoon to feel like, and I wouldn’t have known.

I’d spent so long thinking about what I was supposed to be doing that I’d never really stopped to think about how I wanted my life to feel.

That gap is easy to miss.

Because a life built around protecting what you already have can still look like a life with direction.

The salary goes up.

The mortgage goes down.

The title gets better.

The business starts turning over.

From the outside, you’re doing very well.

And you might be.

But there’s a strange possibility hiding underneath all that sensible progress:

You can become very good at building a life you can defend without ever getting equally good at describing the life you want.

I think that was happening to me.

Safety came with a lever

The other reason I kept choosing safety was that it gave me something to do.

If the problem was money, earn more.

If the problem was security, get the permanent job.

If the problem was experience, start the business on the side.

If the problem was uncertainty, make a more sensible plan.

There was always another lever.

Desire is less cooperative.

“What do you actually want?” doesn’t come with a spreadsheet.

It doesn’t tell you how long it will take.

It doesn’t guarantee that the thing you want will work.

And sometimes you don’t know yet.

That makes it a particularly difficult question for people who have spent years being rewarded for making sensible decisions.

You can get very practiced at asking:

How do I make this safe?

And forget to ask:

Do I actually want this?

The part I didn’t expect

I assumed that changing my external circumstances would change this in me but it didn’t. There is a business now, and it has its own version of the same weather.

Then multiple questions fire at me all at once.

• Is the thing running? What is next? Where is the market going?

• Am I reading it right?

• Should I be doing more? Should I be protecting what I’ve built?

• Will this business work?

The questions arrive at the same hour of the night they always did.

I assumed working for myself would change the tone at least. It didn’t.

Because the thing I had to change wasn’t only the job.

It was the system I had been using to decide what was worth doing.

The version of me who needed everything to be safe didn’t disappear when I left employment.

She came with me and I realise she was never the problem.

She was and is useful.

She knows how to check the figures. She knows how to think ahead. She knows what happens when you don’t have enough money. She knows that other people depend on you.

I still don’t know how to get rid of her. I still don’t know whether I want to get rid of her. I just don’t want her to be the only one making the decisions.

What I am still learning to ask

I used to think the goal was to reach some future point where I’d finally feel secure enough to stop calculating.

A number in the bank. A stable business. A milestone.

Something that would make me stop checking.

I am learning along this journey that I don’t think that definite position exists.

Since things will continually evolve and change.

There will probably always be something to protect.

The question I’m more interested in now is: what else do I want to build my life around?

• What do I want my Tuesday to look like?

• What do I want my life to feel like while I’m building it?

• What kind of work gives me energy rather than simply paying for the things I need?

• What would I choose if I wasn’t trying to make the choice defensible to everyone else?

• What am I protecting and what am I protecting it for?

I don’t have neatly packaged answers to all of those and I am learning to embrace perhaps I am not meant to.

Maybe this is one of the less glamorous parts of reinventing your life that we don’t talk about enough.

You don’t necessarily have to become fearless. You might just have to become more interested in what you are protecting your life for.

The version of me who needed it to be safe is still here.

I don’t think she’s going anywhere.

There’s something bittersweet about that. Knowing that the part of me that wants to protect what I’ve built will probably always have a voice.

I’m just learning that she doesn’t have to be the only one making the decisions.

---

If this landed, these go deeper:

→ How do you know what you actually want

→ The version of me who wanted something slower

---

✍️ New here?

🍀 Multiple Lives Theory is for people in the in-between, when the life you’ve built no longer quite fits, but the next one hasn’t taken shape yet.

I publish Thursdays and Sundays. Both are free.

Paid members get the Reinvention Library — a growing collection of decision maps, workbooks, Notion dashboards, and practical frameworks for figuring out what you actually want and experimenting with what comes next.

The essays are where we make sense of the questions. The Library is where we start turning them into experiments.

Written from inside the transition, not the other side.

---