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.
“Do you miss your old role?”
I have been asked that one more times than any other question about the last couple of years, and I can answer it quickly.
I do not miss the job.
I have never once missed the job.
What I did not expect was how specific the thing I do miss would turn out to be.
It was never the work I had a problem with, and it was never the people.
The life around it did not match what I wanted, and that is a quieter complaint, and much harder to say out loud when somebody asks why I am leaving.
Some of the brightest people I have ever met came out of that job.
Most of them are still my friends.
What I miss
I liked bouncing an idea off somebody and having it come back a different shape.
I am genuinely interested in how other people’s brains work, in the order they put things in, in what they got curious about first and why.
If somebody has built something or pulled something off, I want the story underneath it rather than the summary of it.
I want to know their messy thought processes, the nuanced thinking, the way they describe their passions or the things they hate, I want to hear all of it.
Those conversations were probably the most stimulating part of my week and looking back, I did not think of them as a perk at the time.
I thought of them as the background.
Who decided that the best part of a job is the part nobody writes into the contract?
“It was always the people,” I said, the last time somebody asked and I have said it enough times now that it has started to sound like a rehearsed one liner.
The other thing I miss is less flattering
The structure.
Somebody else deciding when the day started.
A calendar I did not have to build.
Meetings I did not have to justify to myself.
I dictate my own time now, which is the thing I said I wanted and the thing I would not give back.
I did not think of the structure as support while I was inside it.
I took it as a constraint.
How was I meant to tell the difference from in there?
It was doing both at once, and I only found out the proportion after it was removed. Which is a bad way to find out anything.
What I got wrong
I think I assumed the people came attached to the job.
It was a useful assumption. If the good part came bundled with the bad part, then leaving was simple. I could leave the whole thing behind and not have to decide what I was actually going to miss.
Except I did miss things.
Mostly people.
That was inconvenient.
Was it ever actually all or nothing?
Probably not. It just felt easier to make it that way.
The people were portable.
Some of them came with me.
Some stayed. A few I thought I would lose and didn’t. A few I thought I would keep and, somehow, didn’t.
Nobody hands you a list when you leave a life.
There’s no box to tick for the friendships you’re allowed to carry forward, or the jokes, or the people you still want to text even though the reason you met them is gone.
I think I made the calculation quickly on purpose.
I wanted the decision to be finished.
A slower calculation would have meant admitting that I was leaving something I still loved in places. And that was harder to explain.
Especially at a dinner table, where “I left because the whole thing was wrong” is much easier to defend than “I left, but there are people from there I still care about, and some days I miss it.”
I probably needed it to be all or nothing.
It just wasn’t.
The honest version
There is still a bit of FOMO in it.
I will catch up with an old colleague and hear about a normal working week, the things they have to report on, the person they report to, the small politics of it, and I will find myself wondering what that world is like now.
Am I missing something? I do not think I am.
I ask anyway, usually on the walk home.
And then the harder one.
Sometimes I miss feeling important.
I miss being needed by a system that noticed when I was not in it.
That is probably less about the job than about something in me I only started to see properly in the day to day of working, an attachment thing I am still turning over and do not have a clean read on yet.
It is not a flattering thing to find at the bottom of a career change. I would rather the answer had been about the work, and I notice I keep trying to make it be about the work.
What going back would actually mean
If going back means the job, the answer is easy and I have given it a hundred times.
But I am not sure that is what anybody is asking.
I think the question underneath is whether I got the trade right, and the honest answer is that I got most of it right and I am still working out what to do with the rest.
I have taken some of it back already without calling it that.
I book the conversations now, on purpose, instead of waiting for them to turn up because two people happened to be in the same room at the same time.
I put a shape on the week that somebody else used to put there, badly and inconsistently, but I put it there.
Is that going backwards? It does not feel like it. It feels closer to collecting the parts that were mine and leaving the rest where it was.
So when somebody asks whether I would go back, I keep giving an answer that is technically true and not very useful.
No.
But I would take the people, and I would take some of the shape of the week and I am genuinely not sure how much of the job is left once I take both of those out of it.
What is the one part of your old life you would take back if you could take it on its own?
If this landed, send it to somebody who left something good for the right reasons.
If this resonated, these go deeper:
✍️ 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.
