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New to The Multiple Lives Theory? This is the map: what this is, who it's for, and the essays to read first.
Welcome. If you’ve ever outgrown a version of your life you worked hard to build, you’re in the right place.
The Multiple Lives Theory is a weekly newsletter about reinvention, nonlinear careers, burnout, identity, and the many selves we become across one lifetime. I’m Katie: web developer, designer, digital systems thinker, writer, five career pivots in. None of them wrong. Just none of them final. I’m not writing from the other side with everything figured out. I’m writing from inside the transition.
Less hustle culture. More honest becoming.
There’s a fair bit in the archive now, so here’s where to start.
If you read one thing, read this
The Theory of Multiple Lives is the framework the whole newsletter is built on: a way of thinking for people who were never one thing. Read it alongside You don’t pivot. You add., on why “starting over” was always the wrong frame for a life like yours.
If you’re questioning the path you’re on
How I knew it was actually time to leave — not the hundred reasons to go, the one quiet signal.
The five-year plan is dead. The questions haven’t caught up.
You’ve been measuring yourself on the wrong clock — borrowed timelines and inherited milestones.
What season are you actually in — a diagnostic for naming where you are. You’re not behind.
If you’re in the middle of it: identity, grief, relief
The reinvention story we’re not telling — on drift, luck, and the clean narrative we install afterwards.
If you’re tired of explaining yourself
The multi-passionate person’s guide to answering “what do you do.”
How to explain a nonlinear career without apologizing for it
The over-explaining audit — what to stop justifying about your career.
“How’s the business going” is never about the business — and the answer that lands.
If you want everything and were told to niche down
The clarity trap — why “get clear” advice fails people who want more than one thing.
Niche down is the worst advice anyone ever gave a creative person
If you’re actually making the move
The 30-something’s guide to the actual maths of starting over — the calculation most people never write down.
Why your nonlinear career needs a reshape test — how to stop leaving jobs and rebuilding the same one somewhere else.
How this newsletter works
Free subscribers get the weekly essays on reinvention, identity, ambition and modern adulthood, plus Notes and chat threads where the in-between gets talked through in real time, not just written about.
Paid members get two slower, longer essays a month, each ending with a framework, an experiment or an exercise you can actually use — plus the Reinvention Library: decision maps, Notion dashboards, workbooks, templates, guides and mini-courses for when you’re choosing direction or making a change. Essays that stop at insight weren’t enough, so I built the tools that come after.
Say hello 👋
If you read all the way here, tell me what you’re in the middle of.
Leave a comment, reply to any email, send a direct message or find me on Notes. I put every effort to read and connect with my readers! And if something here named a thing you hadn’t been able to name, send it to the person you were thinking of while you read it.
What if we are allowed to become different people across one lifetime?
🍀 Become a member and unlock every resource
Become a paid subscriber to The Multiple Lives Theory to unlock everything I’ve built for people rebuilding in the in-between — the thinking, and the tools that come after it, so you can reshape a nonlinear career, choose a direction with less flailing, and become the next version of yourself without setting fire to the one you already built:
In-depth member essays. Deliberate thinking framed as practical teaching. Each piece ends in a specific framework, experiment or exercise, not just a feeling.
The Reinvention Library. A curated, growing collection of decision maps, Notion dashboards, workbooks and templates designed for real-world use.
Members-only downloads. Step-by-step guides, checklists and mini-courses that translate ideas into action, so you can move with clarity instead of confusion.
Have a look at what’s already waiting inside: The Reinvention Library.
🍀 What it costs
Monthly — A$10 a month. Full access to the essays, the Library and every members-only download. Leave whenever you like.
Annual — A$80 a year (about A$6.67 a month). The same access for 33% less than paying monthly, which is why most people choose this one.
Founding Member — A$120 a year. Everything in the annual plan, plus ongoing email support for your nonlinear career shift and monthly feedback on one piece of your writing.
And staying free is a real choice, not a lesser one: the Sunday and Thursday essays and fragments in between are free forever.