I was tired for three years

On knowing what is wrong with your life and still not being ready to change it.

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 about two or three years, I was tired. But in a way that did not respond to sleeping. My spirit was tired.

My face appeared puffy in every photo from that time. I put on weight, the kind that arrives after years of stress and being wound up for too long rather than from anything in particular that I ate. On top of that, over exerting myself running 2 online businesses and training for my first marathon.

I could see the cortisol weight it in my clothes before I let myself see it anywhere else.

I wore the same two or three things because they were the ones that still sat right.

There was no single day.

I keep looking for one because a day would make a better story. Maybe because a day would also have been easier to act on.

But what actually happened was a build-up, and the place I started seeing it accumulate was in the mirror.

Every morning, the same face, a little further from the one I recognised.

And the same question sitting behind it, which was never really about the work:

How long can somebody look at that and keep filing it under busy?

The explanation

I did say I was tired.

I said it often enough that it became a normal thing to say, which is possibly how it stayed unexamined for so long.

And every time I said it, somebody helped.

• “Oh, just take a break.”

• “Yeah, you need some time.”

• “Take it day by day.”

• “Be nice to yourself.”

None of them were wrong.

They were just answering a slightly different question.

I was saying I was tired, but what I was actually trying to understand was why I could keep functioning inside something that was making me feel increasingly unlike myself.

Work was the easiest explanation because work is a thing you can point at.

The company.

The manager.

The commute.

The hours.

I could imagine the fix. Different company. Better manager. Four weeks somewhere. Less work.

Every explanation came with a lever attached.

That was useful.

It was also, I think, part of the problem.

Because what I was eventually tired of was not just the work.

It was the shape of my days.

The commute was part of it.

The hour I got home was part of it.

What I had energy for afterwards, which was almost nothing, was part of it.

The job was one piece of an arrangement that had stopped working for me.

If the job had suddenly become perfect, would the arrangement have held?

I don’t think it would have.

That was an important thing to realise.

It was also not, by itself, very helpful.

Being correctly informed

We talk about clarity as though it is the missing ingredient.

As though once you finally understand what is wrong, the next step becomes obvious.

Sometimes it does.

Sometimes it doesn’t.

Sometimes you can understand your own life with almost uncomfortable accuracy and still not be able to change it.

That was the part I hadn’t expected.

I knew I was tired.

I eventually understood that I wasn’t simply tired of my workload.

I could see that the problem was bigger than the job.

I could name things I had been tolerating for years.

And still, nothing immediately changed.

There were long stretches where having the right diagnosis almost made me feel worse.

Because once you can see the problem clearly, not acting on it starts to look like a personal failure.

You know.

So why are you still here?

I think we underestimate the distance between knowing and being ready.

Knowing is cognitive. Readiness is everything else.

• Money.

• Energy.

• Fear.

• Relationships.

• Identity.

The consequences of being wrong.

The possibility that the thing you leave will turn out to have been more valuable than you realised.

The possibility that the thing you move towards won’t work.

Sometimes you are not choosing between a bad life and a better one.

You are choosing between something you know how to survive and something you cannot yet see how to survive.

That makes change considerably harder than most advice makes it sound.

What I was actually asking for

There is another part of this I have thought about for years.

The friends.

Most of mine are solution-oriented people.

Someone reports a problem and they hand back a fix, quickly, because fixing something feels like helping.

I do this too.

Somebody tells me they’re struggling and I immediately start looking for the lever.

I will probably do it again this year.

What I wanted from my friends was actually much smaller than advice.

I wanted somebody to say:

“Yeah. I get you. I’m tired too.”

And then not fix anything.

I never actually asked for that.

Which makes it difficult to blame anybody for not giving it to me.

But I think there was something else underneath my inability to ask.

Asking for advice is a request with a shape.

There is something for the other person to do.

Asking someone to sit beside you in something that has no solution yet feels different.

There is no task at the end of it.

No useful thing to hand back.

Just: this is hard, and I don’t know what I’m going to do about it yet.

Maybe that is why we so often translate uncertainty into a request for advice.

Advice gives uncertainty an exit.

Sometimes what we actually need is somewhere to stand while we are still uncertain.

The reframe isn’t the fix

I have caught myself inside this life, tired again in a way I recognise.

Not in exactly the same way.

But enough to know that I was probably wrong to think I had solved anything permanently by understanding it once.

That might be the part of this I find most useful now.

A reframe is not a fix.

Realising that your career no longer fits is not the same as knowing what career should replace it.

Realising that your life has become too small is not the same as knowing what you want to build instead.

Realising that you have been living according to somebody else’s timeline does not immediately give you a new one.

Sometimes the most honest thing you can know is:

This isn’t working anymore.

And then you have to live for a while with the fact that you don’t yet know what comes next.

I used to think that gap meant I wasn’t clear enough.

Now I think sometimes it is simply the gap.

The space between recognising that the old life no longer fits and having enough evidence, energy, courage, money, or desire to build something else.

And maybe we make that space harder than it needs to be because we expect clarity to behave like a decision.

It doesn’t.

Sometimes clarity is just the first piece of evidence.

Sometimes it takes years before you can act on what you already know.

That doesn’t necessarily mean you are avoiding your life.

Sometimes you are still gathering the capacity to change it.

I think about that now when I hear myself say I’m tired.

I try not to reach immediately for the explanation that comes with a lever.

I ask a slightly harder question.

What am I actually tired of?

Not because the answer will tell me what to do.

But because it might tell me what I have been trying not to see.

---

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.

---