You don’t pivot. You add. ‘Starting over’ was always the wrong frame.

I keep hearing people apologise for their own history. The word they use to do it is “pivot.”

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.

I was at a dinner a few weeks ago, the kind where everyone goes around the table explaining what they do, and a woman two seats down described her career using the word “pivot” three times in under two minutes.

She pivoted out of law. Then she pivoted into design. Then, she said, she was “pivoting again,” and she laughed a little when she said it, the way you laugh at something slightly embarrassing about yourself.

I watched her get smaller each time. Not physically. Just the apology underneath it. Each move framed as a correction. As if the last thing had been a wrong turn she was now setting right.

And I recognised it, because I’ve done exactly the same thing.

I used to introduce my own history as a series of departures. I left medical research. I left chemistry. I left a perfectly good career in web development to go into health tech, and then I left that too. Said out loud, it sounds like a person who can’t commit. Like someone wandering through rooms, turning the lights off behind her.

That’s what the word does. Pivot implies subtraction. It says there was a thing, and then I stopped doing the thing, and now there’s a different thing. Each step quietly erases the one before it.

But that’s not what happened. That’s not what happens to anyone.

Here’s the part nobody corrected for me, so Ill say it plainly. The lab didn’t disappear when I stopped standing in one. The eight years of managing briefs and shipping things on time didn’t get deleted when I handed back the title. The chemistry is still in how I break a problem apart. The research is still in how I read a situation before I move inside it.

Every version of me is still in the room. They didn’t leave. I just stopped introducing them.

You don’t pivot. You add.

I understand why the language exists. “Pivot” is a clean word. It’s efficient. It lets you skip the long story in the exact places nobody wants the long story — the dinner, the LinkedIn headline, the bio that has to fit in a sentence. And for a basketball player, for a startup, pivot is accurate. You plant one foot and swing the rest of you somewhere new. Something genuinely gets left behind.

But a person is not a startup. A career is not a single product hunting for a market. When you say you pivoted, you’re borrowing a word built for things that can only be one thing at a time, and pressing it onto a person who is, by definition, accumulating.

The startup pivots because it can’t afford to run two products at once. You are not running out of yourself. You don’t have a burn rate on your own past.

I think the reason this matters isn’t strategic. It’s not really about how you present yourself, although that shifts too. It’s about what you believe actually happened to you.

If you believe you started over — four times, five times, however many — then you believe you’re permanently behind. You’re always the beginner. You’re always the one who threw away a head start. The maths never lands in your favour, because every reset drops you back to zero and the clock keeps running.

But if every version is still in the room, the maths is a different equation entirely.

Then the career that looked like a zigzag from the outside was compounding the whole time. The research taught me how to sit inside not knowing.

The web development taught me how to build a thing and ship it before it was perfect. The health tech years taught me how people actually behave when a system they trusted stops working for them. None of that is gone. It’s deposited.

What if the zigzag was never the story? What if the deposits were?

I want to be careful here, because there’s a version of this that hardens into a slogan, and I don’t trust slogans about my own life. There were moves I made out of fear and called growth. There were jobs I left because I was bored and jobs I left because I was breaking, and from the outside they looked identical, and I’m still not always sure which was which. Addition isn’t automatically wise. You can accumulate the wrong things. You can layer and layer and end up heavier instead of deeper.

So I’m not telling you every turn was secretly brilliant. Im telling you the frame of erasure was wrong even when the decisions were.

The woman at the dinner asked me, near the end, what I did. And I felt myself reach for the short version, the clean one, the one that drops three of the four lives because they don’t fit the sentence.

I didn’t, in the end. I said something closer to the truth. I said I’d done a few different things and they were starting to make sense to me as one thing, even if I couldn’t name the through-line yet. She looked at me for a second like that was allowed. Like it hadn’t occurred to her you could just… not apologise.

I don’t know if she believed me. I’m not sure I fully believe it on the harder days — the ones where the bank balance is arguing with the philosophy, and the philosophy is losing.

But I’ve stopped using the word pivot. That part I’m sure about. Not because I’ve found a better word yet, but because I’ve finally caught what the old one was doing. Making me smaller. Asking me to excuse a history that was never a mistake.

Every version is still here. I’m not starting over.

I’m just adding to the pile, and waiting to see the shape.

— Katie xx