Katie Price may be the closest thing we have to a woman with no secrets.

Hot on the heels of fears that her latest husband had been kidnapped (he later turned up in a Dubai prison), their marriage now appears to be on the rocks – the final straw reportedly being the discovery that his claimed £37 million crypto fortune amounted to £2.22.

By Katie Price standards, it’s just another chapter. For more than 30 years, the marriages, divorces, cosmetic surgeries, bankruptcies, court appearances (and non-appearances), drug use and friendship bust-ups have played out across autobiographies, documentaries, reality TV, tell-all interviews and countless tabloid stories. At this point calling her life an open book feels woefully inadequate. An entire library of revised editions might be more on the money.

And yet I can tell you one thing about Katie Price with absolute certainty: there are parts of her life that not a soul knows about – not even her nearest and dearest.

Because however much we know about the life Katie Price has lived, we know nothing about the other lives she has lived entirely inside her head.

Maybe there’s a Katie who lives in a sleepy village in the south of France, where nobody knows her name. Perhaps she’s a high-flying lawyer who wears navy trouser suits and hasn’t had so much as a parking ticket. Maybe she never married or had children and has spent the past 30 years travelling the world with one small suitcase. I have no idea, and neither does anyone else.

These aren’t quite daydreams. Rather than simply letting her mind wander, The Pricey might sit down with a cup of tea and intentionally pick up exactly where she left off. They’re Parallel Lives: recurring, evolving realities she holds in her head alongside the one she actually lives.

And I’m willing to bet you have them too. You know the lives I mean.

In your real life, perhaps you’re climbing the ladder at a FTSE 100 company. In your Parallel Life you’re the lead singer of a band, despite possessing neither musical talent nor the desire to perform for 20,000 people. Maybe you’re happily married in Surrey but have simultaneously been single in Manhattan for the past 12 years. Perhaps you took the job you turned down, married the person you dumped at 19, have a natural wave, a 26-inch waist and a functioning pelvic floor.

These lives aren’t plans or necessarily even wishes. Some bear almost no resemblance to anything you’d actually choose.

But they’re there, running alongside the real one. You return to them while driving, walking the dog or lying in bed. Some have continuity, history, characters and multiple plot twists. And I have a hunch that women – particularly by midlife – might be very, very good at them.

Not because our real lives are so terrible that we need to escape them. Quite the opposite. Perhaps it’s simply because we want more life.

For decades, “having it all” has been a feminist ambition, and, at times, a bloody annoying gremlin sitting on our shoulders asking whether we’re managing to pull it off.

But perhaps we’ve been asking the wrong question. The problem isn’t that we can’t have a career and a family – or, with sufficient commitment to our Kegels, even the functioning pelvic floor.

There is, however, a fundamental problem with having it all that no amount of flexible working can solve:

We only get one life.

You can leave a relationship and start another, but you can’t simultaneously experience the lifetime in which you stayed and the one in which you left. You can travel the world never staying anywhere for more than a week, but then you’ll never know what it would have felt like to spend 30 years living in Tokyo.

Every choice we make means relinquishing other possibilities. The sad truth is that reality demands either/or. Parallel Lives give us an and. Countless ‘ands’, in fact. An endless ellipsis of possibilities…

That’s why Parallel Lives shouldn’t automatically be treated as evidence of dissatisfaction. Imagining living alone doesn’t mean you want to leave your husband; fantasising about another career doesn’t mean you should resign tomorrow morning.

Sometimes, perhaps, ‘imaginary you’ is simply getting to experience something ‘real you’ never will.

There’s something else rather wonderful about these lives.

Somewhere along the way, privacy became a tech concept. We worry about our digital footprints, search histories and what AI might remember. Even messages to a partner or phone notes written only to ourselves can be exposed to strangers.

Yet there remains a layer of us that nobody can access.

Frida Kahlo, currently the subject of a major Tate Modern exhibition, famously rejected the idea that she painted her dreams, insisting: “I paint my own reality.”

It’s an intriguing distinction. What looked like fantasy from the outside was, to Kahlo, part of her reality – even if it wasn’t necessarily part of her literal life. Which raises the question: even if we documented every event in someone’s life, read every message and uncovered every secret, could we ever completely reconstruct their reality? And do we really want to?

There’s an old adage that we never truly know another person. I’ve always thought that rather bleak but I’m beginning to think it’s glorious.

Because our Parallel Lives aren’t secrets. We’re not deliberately withholding them; they simply belong to us. Even if we tried to explain them to those closest to us, nobody else could quite occupy them in the same way we do.

Psychologists have studied the wandering mind far more than they’ve studied the imaginary B&B I’ve been running in Santorini since 2009.

Research suggests that some forms of daydreaming and mind-wandering can support problem-solving and our sense of vitality. A 2026 study, for example, found that deliberately letting our minds wander can help us think more creatively.

And if imaginary you has been doing the same thing for 20 years, perhaps it is worth asking why. But I’m reluctant to go too far down that road.

Because we have an extraordinary ability to turn pleasure into something else we should be doing better. We count our steps, score our sleep, monitor our heart rate, maintain our meditation streak, set reading targets and turn rest into recovery. Even imagination gets repackaged as visualisation or manifestation, another tool for creating a more successful version of ourselves.

Your Parallel Lives don’t need to make you more creative. They don’t need to reveal your authentic self or alert you to unmet needs. They don’t require a tracker. Perhaps they can simply be fun.

None of us can be every woman we might have been. We can’t make every choice, pursue every ambition or live out every ridiculous fantasy.

But somewhere inside our heads, some of those women get to live anyway. Nobody else gets to meet them, judge them, monetise them or tell them it’s their turn to unload the dishwasher. And nobody, however well they think they know us, gets to know absolutely everything.

We only get one real life. Perhaps our Parallel Lives are one of the last great luxuries we have.