The hardest part of a nonlinear career isn’t building it. It’s explaining it.
On the question that stopped working, and what the person asking actually wants.
Hi, I’m Katie. Welcome to The Multiple Lives Theory, where I write for people who have outgrown a version of a life they worked hard to build. Essays from inside the transition, not the other side. Thursdays and Sundays.
This is the fourth time I’ve tried to write this one. And I’ve finally discovered what it was actually about.
Lately I’ve been thinking about the hardest part of building a nonlinear career, and I’ve convinced myself I don’t think it’s the building part.
Which is a strange thing to say, because I found the building process especially grueling and hard. Extremely hard.
The point where it is unexplainably hard and the only way to understand it is to go through it. But in a way, I am getting better at it.
Financially, money was unpredictable for years. There were long stretches where I couldn’t tell whether I was doing something brave or just avoiding a decision. Overtime, most of that got easier, or I got used to it, and now I’m at the stage where I am unsure there’s much difference between the two.
What hasn’t got easier is answering the four word question at a gathering. In fact it is probably the most jading question during this time of my life right now.
Once you step outside the 9-to-5, the structured career ladder, and the linear path we’ve been taught to follow, you start to see that a career is so much bigger than a job title. Building a portfolio life isn’t just about the work you do. It’s also about the many ways you create, contribute, learn, and evolve. Because there’s so much more to life than what you do for a living.
You know the question I’m talking about. Somebody asks what you do and there’s a beat before the answer, half a second, sometimes less.
In it you’re running a quick calculation. Who’s asking? How much time they’ve got? Which version should I share? Should I share a quick one-liner or just throw a simple job title at them because I honestly cannot be bothered explaining myself. Which version of this gets you both out of the conversation without it turning into a whole thing?
Then in the moment of it all, you pick one.
Perhaps not exactly the answer you wanted to give so you move on.
I did that for years and assumed it was a me problem. That my working life had got too complicated to say out loud, or that there was a sentence out there which would fix it and I simply hadn’t found it yet. If you’ve had the pause, you’ve probably had that thought too, and you’ve probably had it more than once.
I don’t think that’s it anymore. I think the question stopped working a while ago and nobody said anything.
What a job title used to do
It used to carry a great deal more than it does now.
For a long time one word told you nearly everything. Lawyer. Teacher. Electrician. Engineer. Accountant. You would hear it and you would know roughly what someone did all day, what they earned, how long they had trained, what their hours looked like, probably where they sat socially. All of that, from one word, with nothing to follow up…
Which is why the question is so short. And the answer used to be equally short.
A lot of that has come apart, and not in the most even ways either.
The pause belongs to a particular set of people. The ones running a contract, a retainer and something of their own in the same week. The ones who trained for one field, left it, and now use it sideways in another. The ones whose title is accurate on Monday and misleading by Thursday. The ones whose biggest source of income has no settled name, so they end up describing it by comparison to something else.
The question didn’t change, though. Still the same four words, still expecting the same kind of answer, still being asked at every dinner.
And the way we talk about work
And the title is only part of it. The language sitting around the title has the same problem.
First this, then that, which led to here, which is why I’m doing this now.
A line.
Nearly every question we ask each other assumes the line is already there.
How did you get into that. What’s next. Each one is asking you to draw it.
If your work has run in more than one direction, there isn’t a line. Things happened at the same time as each other. Some of it overlapped for years. Some of it only made sense later. You might have built your most useful skill during the stretch your CV calls a gap.
So when someone asks, you have two options. Both of them cost you something, and perhaps you have been alternating between them for years without ever calling it that.
You don’t have to explain or prove yourself. You can flatten it and shape it the way you want to. Pick the piece that makes the most immediate sense, say that, let them file it the way that makes sense to them. It works.
It works so well that you sometimes leave the conversation a bit annoyed at how well it worked. Then you carry on.
Or you can unfold it. Give the real answer, in order, with the connections explained. That’s the one that ends with somebody saying “wow, you’ve done a lot”, which is what people say when they stopped following a while back and want to be kind about it.
Most of us default to one or the other and have done for years without noticing which. You can usually tell by how you feel afterwards. If you flatten, you leave feeling slightly unseen. If you unfold, you leave certain you talked too much.
What the question is actually for
You’ve probably assumed there’s a third option and you just haven’t found the wording for it.
I did too. For a long time.
There isn’t one, and the reason there isn’t is the part that changed how I think about this.
When somebody asks what you do, they’re not asking to understand your working life. They’re lowkey asking where to put you. Somewhere to file you, so they can stop wondering and get on with the conversation.
The question is over the moment they have somewhere to put you. Not when you have finished explaining.
I had this moment of realization when I went to get my hair done, sitting in the hairdresser’s chair (which isn’t a dignified place to realise anything). She asked me, ‘what do you do for work’. I started answering, and somewhere in my second sentence I watched her face in the mirror go still like she was confused. Not that she was bored. But more like she was either distracted or focusing on giving me perfect even layers with my hair.
And at that point I realized it was probably just a question to feel the silence and something that we default to in front of people.
You’ve been giving a more and more accurate answer to a question that was never about accuracy.
I realized that being accurate actually works against you here, which feels unfair. The more precise you are, the longer it takes someone to understand what you do, because they have to hold more pieces in their head before they can make sense of it.
Precision starts to look like complication. Not because your work is confusing, but because you’re trying to fit something complex into a format that was only ever designed to hold something simple.
And the space never gets bigger
The part that surprised me most is that this doesn’t get easier.
You would think it would. Ten years of answering the same question ought to produce a decent answer to it, the way ten years of most things makes you better at them.
It goes the other way. Every new direction you add makes the thing you’re compressing bigger, and the space the other person holds open for your answer stays exactly the size it was when you had one job and four words.
You haven’t got worse at explaining yourself.
What you’re explaining got bigger and the space stayed the same. That’s a maths problem rather than a character problem. I find it steadying, though I notice I want it to mean more than it does.
What changes when you stop aiming for accuracy.
None of this gives you the perfect sentence. There isn’t one. Looking for it’s a good part of what has been tiring.
What it changes is what you’re aiming at, which sounds like a small distinction and isn’t one.
The short answer isn’t a lie. It’s a placement. You’ve probably been treating the four word version as a small betrayal of everything underneath it, when it’s closer to a kindness. The full account still exists. It hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s just not owed to somebody who is holding a comb.
A verb usually works better than a title. A title is a category, and if your work runs in several directions it fits categories badly. What you do to things is easier to place than what you’re, because somebody can picture an effect and has to look up a role. That’s a direction rather than a script.
And the person asking sets the format, not you.
The version for a stranger and the version for somebody who genuinely wants to know are two different things doing two different jobs.
Most of the frustration comes from trying to make one answer do both.
It just can’t. And it was never a fair thing to ask of yourself.
Which quietly changes the question you’re trying to answer. Not ‘what do I do.’ What does this person need in order to stop wondering about me.
That one has an answer, it’s usually short, and it’s different every time.
What this leaves you with
The question isn’t going anywhere. It will keep turning up, at dinners and in taxis and on the second day of every new project, meeting new people and more. That moment will always keep happening.
What you can change and redesign is how you assign meaning to that question and the response thereafter.
It’s easy to assume that struggling to answer it means something is unfinished. That you’re still in transition. That eventually your work will settle into a shape that’s easier to explain.
Sometimes it does. Often it doesn’t.
Some working lives just aren’t the kind that produce a single sentence. Mine hasn’t yet.
Maybe that’s where the real work is. Not in building something unconventional, but in finding new language for it. And learning to talk about it without shrinking it into something it isn’t.
-Katie
What’s the short version you give strangers, and what does it leave out? If this landed, send it to the person you were thinking about while you read it.
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