Hi, I’m Katie. Welcome to Multiple Lives Theory (MLT) 🍀 — a place for anyone who has ever wondered: “How many lives can I live within this lifetime?”
MLT is about identity, reinvention, and the lives we imagine but don’t always choose. These essays explore what those possibilities can tell us about what we want — and how to make decisions when more than one life feels possible.
It’s a Tuesday morning in Nagoya and I am standing in a supermarket aisle holding a plastic basket, looking at rows of unagi rice and pickles and trying to work out which of the things in front of me is the one I actually came in for.
Around me there is that polite rhythmic hum of Japanese, a language I don’t speak yet. I’m buying household essentials. It is the least remarkable thing a person can be doing on a Tuesday.
And standing there I had this strange thought, which is that I had imagined this exact life about a decade ago, and the woman who finally turned up for it isn’t the one who imagined it.
I should go back, because the wanting started earlier than that.
I was in a primary school library doing a cultural project where you had to pick a country and talk about its food and its stories.
Other kids were drawn to anime. I ended up in the origami section, and I remember being completely taken by the fact that a flat square of paper could become something that looked alive, and that it was so disciplined about it.
So I picked Japan because of the origami.
And then because of the cranes.
There’s a story about a girl in Hiroshima called Sadako Sasaki who was diagnosed with leukaemia and held on to the legend that folding a thousand paper cranes would grant a wish.
I looked this up again recently because I wanted to be accurate about it.
She was two when the bomb fell, diagnosed ten years later, and her family have said she folded over 1,300 cranes before she died at twelve.
I was a child reading that and what I took from it was not really about Japan.
It was that even inside something that overwhelming you could still make something beautiful with your hands.
That’s what Japan meant to me before it meant anything else.
By university it had turned into something less romantic and more restless.
I was born and raised in Sydney and my life there was, in a way that I find hard to complain about without sounding ungrateful, already shaped.
There was a Katie-shaped hole and I fit it exactly.
Family knew who I was. My neighbourhood knew who I was.
And for someone who lives mostly in her own head and questions everything, that starts to feel like living inside a frame somebody else built.
What I wanted wasn’t adventure exactly.
It was the radical freedom of being a stranger.
Somewhere with no agenda to meet and no earlier version of me to keep up.
I didn’t go. And the reason I didn’t go is the part I want to be honest about, because it wasn’t really money or timing. I was running on FOMO.
I’d watch people my age chase six figures and land jobs in the glass towers in the CBD, and I’d think, what am I missing here, what is so great about level 60.
And then I’d go and want it too.
Not because I wanted it.
Because I couldn’t stand the feeling of being the one who didn’t.
I ticked the boxes, I got the roles, I ran on high cortisol for years, and eventually I got to a point where I didn’t recognise myself.
Somewhere in there Japan quietly stopped being a thing I was going to do and became a thing that belonged to twenty-something Katie.
She had no anchors. She had no decade of responsibilities and no dozen versions of herself living in other people’s heads.
The move felt like hers, and I had become someone else.
I think that’s the part we get wrong about unlived lives. We don’t decide we can’t have them. We decide they belong to a person who no longer exists.
So here is the thing I did not expect about actually getting here.
I don’t want her life.
I spent a long time grieving the years I didn’t spend here, and now that I’m standing in it, finding my rhythm, learning the rubbish days, working out which supermarket is the good one, I can see that she was chasing something quite different.
A thrill. Somewhere to belong. Probably proof that she could do it alone.
I’m not doing that. I came here on my own terms, which took years to afford in a way that was only partly financial.
I could have taken the sponsored visa and the stable job and arrived here five years earlier inside somebody else’s parameters, and I would have hated it, because the thing I actually wanted was never Japan.
It was not being inside anyone’s parameters at all.
I didn’t come here to go backwards.
I came carrying everything forward.
A way of integrating forward.
The corporate years, the businesses, the boxes I ticked for the wrong reasons, all of it is stitched into the person standing in this supermarket, and I don’t have to give any of it back to be allowed to be here.
Which makes me think we misunderstand these lives when we talk about them as lost. Maybe an unlived life doesn’t close.
Maybe it changes shape, and waits, and gets lived later by someone more complicated than the person who first wanted it.
So the question I keep turning over is not whether you missed something.
It’s this.
What is the life you decided you had missed, and if you got some version of it now, would you actually want the one you imagined then?
I’m drafting these thoughts on my phone standing still in the supermarket, by the way.
I still don’t know what half of this is. I felt I had to capture this in its raw form before these thoughts go.
I’ll work it out, slowly, in a language I’m only starting to learn, in a city where nobody has known me longer than a few weeks.
It is nothing like what I pictured at twenty-five.
It’s better, and it is also completely ordinary, and I think both of those are the same fact.
Maybe it was never late.
Maybe it was waiting for me to become someone who could live it differently.
What is the life you decided you had missed, and would you still want it in the shape you imagined it?
I’ve been thinking more about this here through these writings:
The Reinvention Library is where the tools live
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🍀 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.
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Written from inside the transition, not the other side.
Love your honesty!
This was actually beautiful, I commend the vulnerability and authenticity at which you write this and also understand the facts of your new life in Japan. It's beautiful, it's brave. Took me out into a different world for a while, I hope one day I can write something like this about the live I'm dreaming of too. Thank you for sharing, Katie🤎 😊