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.
I’m writing from Japan at the moment, living as a digital nomad. A new essay lands every Sunday.
The short version: the lives I didn’t live didn’t expire. They waited. Writing them down showed me there were fewer than I thought, and that some of them were never lives at all.
I’d assumed these things expired.
I never said it in so many words, but that was the shape of it. I wanted something at twenty, I didn’t do it, and at some point the wanting would quietly lapse because I’d have become a person it no longer applied to.
Like a membership I stopped renewing.
That isn’t what happened. They sat there, unchanged, for more than a decade, and then one of them came back at full volume when I was thirty-two and not expecting it at all.
It didn’t come back when I was unhappy which is when I’d have predicted it. It came back when I finally had enough room to hear anything, well after the worst of it. I nearly missed it, because I wasn’t expecting a want to turn up during a good week.
For years I’d carried them around as a kind of atmosphere. A general sense of a whole other life running alongside this one, with more in it than I could ever get through.
Then I actually wrote them down, and there were three. They fit in a few lines. I’m still not sure whether that made them lighter or heavier.
The Japanese studies I nearly enrolled in and didn’t.
The writing, which started much earlier than this newsletter, with an English teacher who was the first adult to say it out loud to me. I’ve completely lost her actual words. I remember perfectly well that she thought it.
And the businesses, which I built and sold, and which I wonder about in a way that isn’t regret, because selling was right, but sits somewhere next to regret. I haven’t found the word for it yet.
The sense of a huge shadow life came entirely from never having counted.
Writing them down didn’t make them go away. It just meant I could finally count them.
What I notice about all three is that none of them aged. They’re exactly as they were.
I have aged considerably. My reasons for wanting things have been replaced a couple of times over.
My tolerance for discomfort has gone one way and my tolerance for boredom has gone the other. None of that got applied to the three things on the list.
It makes me wonder whether we outgrow them at all.
What I seem to have outgrown is the version of me who was going to do them.
I think I’d been treating those as the same thing and they aren’t. She moved on. It was the want that stayed where it was.
And once one of them actually happens, the others change status, which nobody warned me about. For years they were just ideas, and I never had to do anything about them. Now that I’m living in Japan and writing this every week, the rest have been quietly reclassified from impossible to outstanding.
Which makes them feel a lot more like a to-do list, and I’m not sure I like that.
There’s a second kind of thing on the list, though, and it’s worth knowing about before you go and act on any of it.
Some of what I was carrying wasn’t a life. It was a picture of a person I wanted to be seen as. A picture doesn’t survive contact with an ordinary Tuesday, and you can usually tell the moment you describe it without any adjectives.
“Live abroad” sounds like a life.
Without the adjectives it’s closer to buying groceries in a language you can’t speak, alone, indefinitely, including on the days you feel unwell.
A few things I’d always half-counted fell off while I was still writing the sentence out. They were things to have, more than things to do.
I would have resisted this a few years ago, because it sounds like a way of talking yourself out of things. It’s ended up doing the opposite for me. Taking the pictures off is what makes the real ones possible to look at. A couple of real wants can be planned for. A cloud of nine assorted ones can’t be looked at directly at all.
If you’ve got a few of these yourself, here’s roughly what I did:
Write them down. All of them, including the ones that feel silly. I’d have guessed dozens. It was three.
Describe each one without adjectives. What would an ordinary Tuesday in that life actually involve? If it stops appealing while you’re writing the sentence, it was probably a picture.
Sort what’s left. Some have quietly closed. Some are still available. The available ones are the ones that turn from impossible into outstanding, which is less comfortable, and more honest.
So I wouldn’t say the unlived lives go away, and I wouldn’t say they’re all instructions either.
I’d say they keep.
Which isn’t the reassuring version, because a thing that keeps is a thing I’ll have to deal with eventually. I’ve started on two of mine, more than a decade late. I still don’t know what to do with the third.
Which of yours is a life, and which is a picture?
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