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.
For a long stretch of my life, the first thing I did every morning was open a diary and write down three deliverables.
Not one list.
Three.
One for each area I was running at the same time: the corporate role, the business I was building on the side, and whatever I’d decided that week counted as looking after myself.
Most days I did this before I’d had a coffee, some days before I was properly awake.
I didn’t think of it as unusual.
It was just how the day started, the way other people check their phones.
Three lines decided whether the day had gone well by the time I lay back down and did it again the next morning.
What was that actually measuring?
Not much, looking back. It measured whether I’d kept pace.
It never asked if the work meant anything that day, or whether I’d spoken to anyone who wasn’t a colleague or a client. It only asked whether the three boxes were ticked.
I’ve been trying to work out what I actually wanted underneath all of it, and the honest answer is smaller than I expected.
I didn’t want to achieve less.
I wanted the time I spent on things to be on purpose instead of raced through so I could get to the next line. Intentional, not idle.
I used to talk about those two as if they were the same thing.
There’s a version of envy I’ve never said out loud until now.
It wasn’t the people with the bigger job or the better outcome I envied. It was the ones who seemed content with an ordinary nine to five.
From where I stood, they looked settled. Not thrilled, not underachieving, just fine with it.
I couldn’t work out how anyone got to fine.
Was there ever a day it would have been enough to just be fine, the way they seemed to be?
I had the promotions. I had, by most measures, a good salary and a title people recognised on sight.
None of it did what I thought it would, which was let me stop looking for the next thing. I’d get one answer and need a better one within the week.
Nobody sat me down and told me to be like this.
It arrived early and quietly, from a primary school teacher, then a high school one, then the ordinary drift of a family that wanted the best for me and said so in the language of achievement, because that was the language everyone around us used.
A version of adulthood got handed to me before I was old enough to ask where it came from.
It wasn’t cruel and it wasn’t even wrong, most of it.
A teacher telling a nine-year-old she was bright and should aim higher is not a crime.
It’s just that nobody was ever going to circle back later and check whether the aiming higher was still mine by the time I was thirty.
What would I have written down at nine, if anyone had thought to ask what I wanted instead of what I was good at?
What it turned into, practically, was needing something to say.
At work, at a dinner, on a call home, someone would ask how things were going, and I’d feel the pull to have an answer that sounded worth their asking.
Not a status update.
Evidence.
I spent a chunk of my twenties collecting things to say out loud in that exact ordinary moment.
How much of what I chased in that decade was actually mine, and how much was just something I could report on without flinching?
I don’t think I was being dishonest about it, exactly. I believed the trophies were the goal.
It’s only from here I can see them as a stand in for something I didn’t think I was allowed to just have, which was being okay without one.
I still open a document most mornings.
It doesn’t have three deliverables in it anymore, or it does on some days and I let it not on others.
I haven’t fully worked out what replaced the version of me who needed a full inbox to feel like the day had counted.
Some mornings the document just has one line in it: what actually mattered today.
Most mornings I still can’t answer that without circling back to something I did, which probably means I’m not finished with this yet, not that I’ve solved it.
I’m not sure I’d recognise her if I saw her now. I’m less sure she’d recognise this.
What would you have to stop reporting on before you found out what you actually wanted?
If this landed, send it to somebody who is quietly still keeping score.
If this landed, these go deeper:
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Written from inside the transition, not the other side.
sometimes the hardest part is realizing you built a life that looks right and still doesn’t feel like yours.
“I spent a chunk of my twenties collecting things to say out loud in that exact ordinary moment.” … I got tired of that same collecting, and spent a chunk of my thirties hiding from ordinary moments.
Beautiful thoughts here, Katie, and I’m certain they resonate for many.