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.
Last year when I left my job, my mum asked me gently, whether I’d thought about going back to university.
Do you want to study a course and then get another job?
It wasn’t a criticism.
It was the shape she reaches for whenever she isn’t sure where I’ve landed or headed.
It’s the safest sentence available to a parent who has run out of the version of me she understands.
I didn’t correct her. There wasn’t a clean way to. Nor was it in my best interest to do so…
What I’m doing now doesn’t fit inside a course or a job titleand explaining it usually makes both of us more anxious, because it sounds unstable.
Anxious for me because I have to hear myself sound unstable while I say it.
This isn’t a story about one conversation.
It’s been happening in some form since the first time I changed shape, a new business, then a new job, then quitting that job.
Every time, somebody who has known me a long time reaches for the last stable version of me they had on file.
How many times can you outgrow the same explanation before it stops feeling worth giving?
With my parents it’s the most straightforward part of this, because parents are always going to be parents.
They’re going to worry about the future whether I ask them to or not, and the worry has a language. And the language is safety.
Find a job.
Be stable.
My mum isn’t wrong. Those things are actually comforting.
She’s just describing a life I’ve already tried and left.
Is it possible to reassure someone without pretending I’m about to become a person I’m not?
Friends are a different texture entirely.
Lower stakes, because they’re changing too.
When they ask what job I want next, what role or company I want to work for, it doesn’t sting the way I’d expect it to. It reads less like judgment and more like two people trying to describe something to each other that neither of us has language for yet.
Nobody in that conversation has a finished answer, which somehow makes the not knowing easier to sit in together.
I don’t think my friends mean the question the way it lands either.
It just assumes a next role exists, because that’s still the frame most of us were handed, the idea that a life moves in a straight line from job to better job.
It’s not malicious.
It’s just the only shape the question knows how to take.
It’s old colleagues where I notice the distance most.
They knew a specific version of me, the one who showed up to that job in that year, and that’s the version they kept.
A colleague relationship has a start and an end date built into it, and once it ends, nothing updates.
They’re still advisory about it, still offering the kind of guidance you’d give someone earlier in a career they assume I’m still in.
I can tell, partway through the conversation, that they’re being kind to someone who isn’t quite in the room anymore.
What do you call it when someone is being kind to a person who doesn’t exist like that anymore?
It’s a specific kind of loneliness, being unrecognized by people who actually know you, rather than by strangers.
A stranger has no version of you to be wrong about.
These are people who watched me build the first version of this life and are still, kindly, addressing that person.
There’s a particular kind of distance that opens up in those moments.
Quiet, not dramatic.
Not a fight, not a falling out.
Just the private recognition that this person doesn’t actually know who I am right now, and there isn’t a version of the conversation where I can fix that in the time we have.
People update their picture of you when they update it.
You can’t do the update for them, no matter how well you explain it.
I used to think I owed people the corrected version.
That if I explained it well enough they’d catch up.
I’ve mostly stopped trying. Not out of resentment. But more out of running the numbers.
The amount of energy it takes to update someone else’s idea of you rarely matches what you get back for the effort.
What I do instead, most days, is smaller than that.
I show up for myself however I can manage that day, and let the explaining wait.
It isn’t a system. Some days it’s just choosing not to spend the phone call defending a decision I’ve already made.
Other days it’s not correcting a colleague mid sentence because the correction would take longer than the conversation has left in it.
Is it possible to feel completely certain about a decision and still feel unmoored by how few people can see it the way you do?
So I still answer when my mum asks about uni.
I still tell old colleagues something close to the truth and watch them nod at a version of it that isn’t quite what I said.
I’ve made a kind of peace with being partly unknown to the people who’ve known me the longest, though I’m not sure peace is the right word for it.
It’s closer to a low, ongoing hum I’ve learned to work alongside.
Most days I don’t notice it. Other days, like the day she asked about uni, I notice all of it at once.
Who in your life is still talking to a version of you that hasn’t existed for a while?
If this landed, send it to somebody who is quietly being someone new around people who haven’t caught up yet.
If this landed, these go deeper:
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Written from inside the transition, not the other side.
Apparently I was wrong. Moving to Japan has in fact seemed to raise the bar on your work. I completely love this article. If I had a dollar for every time someone said, just get a job, I’d have three dollars. A dollar for every time those same people said it more than once and I could almost afford a burger.
I do have a challenge for you though. This part, where you said,
“Is it possible to reassure someone without pretending I’m about to become a person I’m not?”
I always like to leave room to be wrong, so if I am don’t hold back. But I disagree with that statement. The pretense was being the person they thought you were. Doing the things that were safe and expected. That was the version of you that made everyone else happy, except you. You don’t recognize the new person because you stuffed them in a broom closet years ago, in a building whose address you don’t recall and have only just found the key and GPS coordinates. Those that you wish to reassure will be: when they see and recognize the you you’ve always been and were meant to be. Katie 2.0
Who you are becoming, in my opinion, is who you want to be. And more than that who you’ve actually always been. The recognition of that person often only occurs in hindsight and is hard to completely visualize while you’re in it. The core you will always reflect familiarity back at you. The version of it that people eventually see has to happen organically.
“Tell. Don’t tell. There is no explain!”
I’ve tried so many times to explain what I am wanting and trying to do and it falls on deaf ears often. So, I too have abandoned the court of appeals trying to convince others why this matters to me so much. What is important is that it matters to me. And as you said, showing up for yourself is what it comes down to. Those that know the “old” you will come to know the real you exactly as the rest of us on Substack have: by continuing to do what you are already doing. And you do it very well as I see it! Keep on trucking👊🏻👽
PS - You are actually still the exact same person you’ve always been at your core. You’ve learned and grown and have complete agency over your life. That is a rare thing that those who don’t have that can’t understand or are too afraid to admit. You’re doing it for yourself. Again, opinion. Nobody can ever claim to know you better than you know yourself. We just forget that sometimes I think.
“How many times can you outgrow the same explanation before it stops feeling worth giving?” Felt that