You can grieve the life you never chose
You can still do it. That's what makes it worse.
Hi, I’m Katie! Welcome to The Multiple Lives Theory. This is a space for anyone rewriting the rules of modern work, embracing a nonlinear career, and actively designing a life of creative freedom outside the standard 9-5 ladder.
The version of me who wanted to live abroad
This week, while building out this new version of myself, I’ve felt an older version of myself come back.
Not in a big, dramatic way. Just quietly. As if trying to share a hidden sadness that doesn’t often get spoken out loud.
It happened in the middle of my usual day-to-day, planning, ideating and drafting. Just another ordinary hour at my desk, mapping out ideas for the year ahead, writing my next essay for MLT, and there she was…quietly making her presence known, but shying away at the same time.
She’s the version of me who wanted to live in Japan for a while. To teach English. To experience cultural exchange and maybe even live with host parents. To be inside someone else’s version of normal. To find out who she could be in a place she did not grow up in.
I haven’t thought about her in a long time.
Why I chose science instead
I was maybe twenty when that dream was loudest, in my second year of uni, picking out my electives as you would. I naturally excelled in science-based units, so while I enrolled in all my mandatory ones, I was inexplicably compelled to choose more science for my electives. I look back at it and wonder, why Katie?
I had peers who were doing electives in business, finance and cultural studies. I was so close to enrolling in Japanese studies, but my comfort stayed in science.
Normal, to her, looked like waking up in someone else’s language. Eating breakfast at a table that wasn’t hers.
I look back and wonder what it would be like to learn how another family lived, talked, forgave, sat in silence together. I never got past the pondering stage. A few tabs open. A program page bookmarked that I never dared to apply to. It stayed a private thing, something I told almost no one, which maybe is part of why it was so easy to let go of. I thought to myself, perhaps I was having a moment.
It’ll pass, I told myself.
The job offer that ended it
After graduation, I was head down looking for a job or continuing on to a Masters, because that was really all I knew. It felt like the natural progression in scientific academia at that stage. Not thinking about it too much, just following what I thought was right.
During my last year of university, I picked up blogging, building and designing websites on WordPress, Wix and Squarespace in my spare time. It was the only thing giving me solace in my time of confusion, turmoil and ‘what do I do with my life’ conundrums.
Then one afternoon after my medical reception shift, I had this grand epiphany, asking myself, ‘wait, what am I really doing with this Masters degree and where do I want to go with it?’
It was a brief moment of realisation that I was cruising, and I put myself in the driver’s seat. From that moment forward, I always wondered what it would be like to design for the web. I applied for any job possible, fixed up my resume and found a way to stand out. After my first full-time job offer in tech, I slowly let go of the idea that I wanted to move abroad. Almost as if that life had already passed as I discovered this new one in the world of technology, digital design and hustle culture.
I think I stopped thinking about her somewhere around that first real job offer, the one that came with a salary and a title and made the idea of teaching English abroad look like something people do before their life starts, not during it.
So while that all happened across five years, it led me to focus on striving for promotions, bringing value to the company, and jumping roles because I found out that you can double your salary by not ‘climbing the corporate ladder’ at one company.
Years later, I still think about Katie in another life, another timeline, where I’m in Japan teaching English and building a life there. It’s strange, because technically I could still do all of that now.
Nothing is stopping me. But it doesn’t feel the same. When I look back at that version of myself, the way she imagined her life, I can’t help but feel something close to a grieving sadness. Do you feel that way too?
The obstacle was never logistics
As I deeply reflect on every life decision I’ve ever made, if I’m completely honest, the obstacle isn’t logistics. It’s that I haven’t made the self-trusting decision to live the way I want.
If I had to name it precisely, it probably has to do with a mix of confidence, seeking approval, and wanting to feel accepted no matter where I went.
I look back and wonder: did I just focus on my career because it felt like I was being cheered on for it?
And I don’t know if I’m the same person who wanted it, and doing it now would mean admitting I built an entire decade around a version of success she never asked for.
A person or a possibility
The more I think about it, the more I’m not sure if I’m grieving a person or a possibility.
Would I be a different person if I’d chosen differently back then? Would my life look any different now?
A person you can picture ageing, changing, disappointing you in specific ways. A possibility just stays perfect, frozen at the exact age she was when I put her down.
Perhaps I’m not grieving the choices I made or didn’t make. Just that it didn’t happen then.
But why does it matter so much? Is it timing? What would have been the difference between living out what I wanted then, versus doing it now?
Is it because there’s a version of that life that was only available to a low-stakes twenty-year-old with nothing to lose and nothing built yet? She could have left with no ties to anything, no adult responsibilities, no reputation to protect. I can’t get that particular kind of freedom back, even if I book the same flight.
But I wonder if this is the wrong type of thinking. It feels as if I’m painting freedom as scarce.
Whose approval was I actually chasing?
It felt like a version of her was achieving things driven by what society deemed normal, or because they fit within the parameters of what would be considered ‘impressive’ enough to gain the approval of others.
If I picture a face attached to that pressure, it’s not one specific person. It feels more like a composite. The primary school teacher who awarded me the DUX and said, ‘you’re going to be a doctor.’
My favourite high school teachers who called me ‘bright and smart.’ Family who used the word ‘stable.’
A version of adulthood that got handed to me early and I never thought to question.
Underneath all this, I think there was another version of me that wanted something slower. Something with more room for myself in it. She got overridden so fast I’m not sure she ever got a name.
Studying science because she was good at it in high school and university. Trying careers in healthcare and medicine because it was a natural progression.
Pivoting into the web space only because it was her pastime outlet and the money was promising. Subscribing to tech hustle culture, where productivity and optimising were rewarded.
What a normal week actually cost
I remember sitting a science exam I’d studied weeks for, getting the mark I wanted, and feeling nothing. Not relief. Not pride. Just the quiet confirmation that I was good at doing things I didn’t actually want.
That became the pattern. A normal week during the hustle years looked like waking up before an alarm out of guilt, answering messages before I’d properly opened my eyes, measuring the day by how much I’d produced rather than how I felt inside it.
The technology world rewarded productivity above everything else and it cost me the ability to tell the difference between resting and failing.
The slow leak
Years later, after major burnout and observing everyone around me, I started to notice that this was not what I wanted anymore. Everything felt odd. The kind of odd we don’t talk about. That we worked so hard, night and day, to build a life we no longer want.
Odd looked like sitting at my desk on an ordinary Tuesday and not recognising the life around me. Constant wondering of, ‘what am I doing here? What do I really want?’
It wasn’t one single day. It was a slow leak I didn’t notice until the tank was already empty, until getting out of bed took the kind of effort that used to be reserved for hard things.
I look back and think it’s so strange. How we spent so many years, so many grueling hours, so much stress chasing everything on a checklist of things to achieve, only to realise I no longer want the life I built.
The stable paycheque that made my parents stop worrying.
The impressive title working in technology.
Running two small businesses on the side, as if it was something so glamorous.
The house.
A calendar so full it looked like proof of being important.
I remember the exact moment it cracked, sitting in my car in a parking lot before work, unable to make myself walk inside, thinking, I don’t want any of this, and being terrified because I’d spent a decade building toward it.
What’s burned down, and what hasn’t
I read a quote that stuck with me during a time when I was in a stagnant phase after burning out and years of misalignment with myself. In order to build the life that feels aligned, we must first burn down everything we know.
Day by day, I was on auto-pilot. I had a solid daily routine. Looking after my physical health was a representation of how much discipline I had.
While I was doing all the things:
waking up at 6am
going for my morning run
having a solid breakfast
gymming in the afternoon
repeating that
I felt like I was a walking shell. As if my soul was no longer there and I was just doing it because I was programmed to.
The stagnant phase also looked like cancelled plans and unanswered messages. Putting a smile on my face and saying ‘I’m good’ each time I met people and caught up with family.
Days that blurred into each other because nothing in them needed me to be a particular version of myself. I wasn’t building. I wasn’t performing. I was just surviving each one, which at the time felt like failure and now looks a lot like the beginning of something.
That quote stayed with me for some time and is still present to this day.
Since then, the job title burned down. The idea that productivity equals worth burned down, mostly. What hasn’t burned down yet is the instinct to explain myself, to justify why I’m allowed to want something different now. I still catch myself doing it in conversations I haven’t even had yet.
With all my thoughts firing at once, I could sense it in my body. Or sense my previous self, grieving a version she wasn’t able to live.
How wild is that.
I felt it in my shoulders and my chest. It felt heavy, tight and hollow. Almost as if I’d turned into that walking shell. But this time, not walking. Just a curled-up shell.
The tightness in my chest wasn’t quite panic and wasn’t quite sadness. Somewhere in between, the way grief usually is. I was at my desk when it happened, mid-task, nothing dramatic going on around me at all, which is maybe what made it land harder. Grief doesn’t wait for a good moment. I felt homesick for a future I haven’t even lived yet.
And whilst I have my life goals to ground me, I’m feeling the grief of time, events, experiences and the ‘what ifs’ of the life I didn’t live.
It’s not like ordinary homesickness, which at least has an address. This has no place attached to it. Just a feeling of missing something I never had the chance to miss properly the first time. My current goals feel more mine than the old checklist ever did, or at least I hope they are, and not just a newer, quieter version of the same performance.
The ‘what if’ that visits most is the simplest one. What if I had gone when I was twenty, before I knew what staying would cost me?
Even though I could still live out those dreams now, moving my life to Japan, living in Copenhagen for a while, building my business overseas as a digital nomad, I still feel the grief of a life I didn’t get to live in my twenties.
Copenhagen isn’t an old dream. It’s a newer one, something that showed up after I started building this version of myself, proof maybe that the wanting never actually stopped.
It just changed shape.
Realistically, it would take very little. A decision. A date. The willingness to be a beginner again in a language and a city that owes me nothing.
Even though there’s always a chance today, the grief occupies my mind. It’s a feeling I’m unable to describe.
If I had to describe it without using a single emotion word, I’d say it feels like standing at a train platform after the train has already left, knowing another one will come, and still feeling the specific weight of having missed that one. Does that happen to you sometimes?
Even on a daily commute to work. You’re not really missing out on anything, but you missed that train, and it still lands as ‘damn, I missed it.’
I don’t know if it needs to loosen.
Maybe it’s allowed to just stay, quietly, alongside everything else I’m building.
-Katie
More from Multiple Lives Theory:
→ The multi-passionate person’s guide to answering “what do you do”: on describing a life that doesn’t fit one title
→ You don’t pivot. You add.: on why “starting over” was always the wrong frame
→ I’ve been five different people at work. None of them were wrong.: on the rooms, before I had the word for them
→ the clarity trap: on why “get clear” fails the people who want everything
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Multiple Lives Theory is a weekly essay on nonlinear careers, reinvention and the emotional reality of changing your life. Sundays and Thursdays.
