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.
There was a page I kept bookmarked through most of second year.
It was a program listing for Japanese studies, with a year abroad and a host family. I had it open so often it became a habit.
Then enrolment week came, I picked more science, and the page stayed bookmarked in a browser I don’t use any more.
I’ve told that story a handful of times, usually quickly, as a small funny thing about a girl who was very sure she was sensible. I’ve almost never told the part that matters. At the time I told nobody.
Not my parents, not the friends I saw daily, not the teacher who’d spent two years telling me I could write. The want lived in my head for about a year, then stopped, and nothing in the visible world changed.
I’ve called that regret for twelve years.
I don’t think the word fits, and I suspect many people use it for three different feelings. This essay separates them and gives you a short check to tell which one you’re carrying.
Why the word didn’t fit
Regret is meant to respond to information.
You make a choice, it goes badly, and the feeling updates you so you choose differently next time. It should shrink as evidence comes in.
Mine didn’t. It didn’t shrink with time or with success, and it didn’t shrink when my circumstances changed enough that the original objection no longer applied.
I’d say, it got more precise. A feeling that ignores new evidence isn’t judging a decision. It’s attached to something the decision never touched.
That gives you a first test. If your regret stays the same size when the facts change, it may be filed under the wrong name.
Three things that get called regret
1. Regret with an address.
There was a fork, with a date on it. You had real options, you took one and the other closed. You can point at it and argue about it. You can also test it, because what you wanted often still exists in some form, at a different price and on a worse schedule.
2. Regret with no address. The want never left your head. Nobody argued you out of it because nobody knew. There was no fork because you never brought it anywhere forks get discussed. It didn’t get overruled, it never entered the record. This kind doesn’t respond to living the life. You can end up in the actual country doing some version of the actual thing and the feeling stays put, because it was never about the country. It was about a whole want existing for a year, in detail, with a bookmarked page attached, and no one else knowing.
3. Comparison. It arrives looking like a serious reckoning with your past, and it’s usually set off by someone else. A person you went to uni with posts something from a life you once had a bookmark for, and within about four seconds you’re having a profound thought about your twenties. I wasn’t. I was having a smaller, less flattering feeling and calling it philosophy, because philosophy is more respectable than envy.
How to tell which one you have
Ask what year the regret is set in.
If your answer is a life, like the writing life or the version where I stayed in research, you’re probably looking at the first kind.
Lives are ongoing and you can check what one costs now. If your answer is a year, and it usually is if you sit with it for a second, you’re missing a person, not a life. For me it was a twenty year old at a desk with a browser open, who hadn’t said anything out loud and so hadn’t lost anything yet. I can’t go and get her, and I was faintly annoyed for a long time that moving countries didn’t fix that.
Then ask who knew at the time. If several people knew and it still hurts, the hurt is probably about the choice, and a choice can be re-examined. If nobody knew, the hurt is probably about the silence. I have a small collection of these now and almost all of them are the silent kind. That left me with a less comfortable question: why was I so consistently quiet about the things I wanted most?
Last, check the timing.
Real regret doesn’t need a trigger. It sits there at two in the morning with nobody’s holiday photos involved.
Comparison only shows up when there’s someone to compare against, and it fades about a day later. I can’t offer anything clever for this one. I just name it now and ask: what is this, and did somebody else start it? That question has saved me several evenings.
Why we’d rather have made a mistake
I hold this loosely. Calling it a wrong choice is easier than calling it an unspoken want.
If I chose wrong, I made an error, and errors can be analysed and fixed. That at least feels like agency. If I never said it, I wanted something and didn’t think it would survive contact with anyone else. That’s an admission about what I thought my wants were worth in a room, and it has nothing to do with decision making. So I filed it as a logistics problem, because those have solutions. I did that for twelve years and was fairly pleased with how rigorous I was being.
Silence also keeps the want deniable. If nobody heard it, I can revise it downwards later and decide it was never that serious, and nobody’s around to say you talked about this constantly for a year.
