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.
A few months ago I told a childhood friend I was moving abroad for a while.
Temporary, not even long.
I said I had always loved watching shows about people who do it properly, who start a life somewhere with no family nearby and no safety net, just themselves.
“It’s such brave thing to do,” I said.
She had done something like it once herself, a few month overseas, sponsored by her work.
“Yeah, for a short while” she said, and moved the conversation along like it was nothing.
I did not move the conversation along.
While she kept talking, my mind was somewhere else, running a version of my own life where I had done what she did, younger, sponsored, with none of the second-guessing.
What would that one have been like?
I realise this feeling never arrives at one big moment.
It happens in small oscillating ones.
Mid-scroll, mid-conversation, halfway through a walk I am only half paying attention to.
I will see a video of somebody speaking fluent Spanish, French or Japanese and think about the language school I never enrolled in, not for work, not for any practical reason, just because I was interested.
Or a friend posts about marathon training and I do the small useless maths.
What if I had started at twenty two instead of twenty eight?
Probably negligible, I tell myself and shrug it off. Yet I still do the maths in my head.
The language one has a specific edge to it.
I never sat down and properly learned Vietnamese growing up and there is a difference between not learning that and not choosing to learn Spanish out of interest.
One is circumstance.
The other is a door I could have walked through and did not.
Which one am I actually grieving?
I have never been able to answer that cleanly, which probably tells you something about how muddled this gets the moment I look at it straight on.
What I am actually morning is not the outcome.
I do not know that fluent Spanish or Japanese or an earlier marathon would have changed very much at all.
What I sit with for five minutes on a walk, is the other version of me who tried.
Who would she be?
That is the question underneath it, and once I let myself ask it properly it stops staying contained to the one example.
I start asking it about all of them at once.
The lived detours, the jobs I actually took and left, I have mostly made my peace with.
I can point at what they built. This is a different flavour of the same ache and it is harder to put down, because there is nothing to weigh.
No lesson the unlived version taught me.
Just the maths, and the walk, and the five minutes it takes to run it before I put my phone back in my pocket and carry on.
I have been calling it a rabbit hole, but that is not quite right either.
It is closer to thinking a few degrees deeper than the day required, and once I am there it is hard to climb back out without noticing what I am doing, which is grieving.
Not a version of myself that was taken from me.
But she feels like a version I never even reached for.
Although I am aware this is a fairly comfortable thing to grieve.
Nothing was taken. Nobody died.
I chose the things I chose and most of them were fine and there is a version of this essay that is just a well-fed person being wistful about optional languages.
I know that.
Is it even grief, or is it appetite with nowhere to put itself?
I still think the small useless maths is worth looking at, because of what it is doing rather than what it is about. But I would not want to dress it up as loss.
It is more like that curiosity that still stings a bit.
The part I do not say out loud very often
Even now, building something that is mine, working for myself where anybody can watch, I still catch myself entertaining the easier option.
Why not go and get a job at a bigger company and get sponsored to move somewhere?
It would solve the same longing in a fraction of the time, on somebody else’s budget, with somebody else deciding the terms.
I know exactly what that life costs. I have lived it. I still find myself doing the arithmetic on it anyway.
It shows up in specific, mundane places.
A job ad for a role I am overqualified for and underwhelmed by, and I read the relocation line twice before I close the tab.
A former manager posting from a new country on a visa her employer sorted out.
I notice every time…what am I actually looking for when I read the relocation line twice?
That is the part that unsettles me.
Not that I have unlived versions of myself I think about. I think everybody probably does.
It is that building the independent life has not made the grieving stop, and it has not made the easier, more sponsored version any less tempting to picture.
I thought getting out would settle the question.
But really, it just changed which version of the question I am carrying on the walk.
Which version of yourself do you keep doing the small, useless maths on?
If this resonated, these go deeper:
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Written from inside the transition, not the other side.
