The Life You Didn't Choose

A new word for the choice you don't regret — but can't leave behind

Do you ever find yourself revisiting a major moment of choice from your past? Maybe it surfaces often, and you feel compelled to turn it over, examining it from every angle, again and again. There may be a twinge of longing or incompleteness attached to that critical juncture — and for some reason you can’t stop looking at it and wondering. Even if you’re at peace with the choice you made, there’s an unnamed feeling that comes with the weight of the moment: a frustrating fascination with the other path, the one you will never know.

I have one of these. Music was the first great love of my life, and I spent an enormous amount of my time between third grade and grad school focused on it. Then, rather unexpectedly — just as I was crossing from student to professional musician — I felt what I can only call a spiritual calling; one that I knew would require most of my attention. The cost of this choice took the physical form of a gorgeous black Yamaha baby grand that lived in my room. It was my pride and joy. To fund the new path, it would have to be sold — sacrificed, really — along with my dream of pursuing music in a serious way, forever. And though I don’t regret it, part of me still wonders about that musician I’ll never get to meet.

There’s a writer named John Koenig who sought out scores of emotions the English language had never named, and coined his own words for them — one of which, sonder, now appears in Merriam-Webster. The project is called The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, though the feelings he names are far broader than sorrow. Sonder is the dawning awareness that every stranger you pass is living a life as vivid and complicated as your own. His word onism is the frustration of being stuck in a single body that can only ever be in one place at a time. I scoured his dictionary to see whether he’d named my feeling — the ever-futile return — but he hadn’t. So I coined my own.

The word is mataionostia.

n. the compulsion to return, again and again, to a single crossroads in your past — not one you stumbled through blindly, but one you saw clearly and chose with open eyes — turning the decision over as though this time the other path might resolve into view; knowing, even as you do it, that the looking can change nothing, recover nothing, and lead nowhere but back to the same fork, worn smooth from your visits.

It comes from two Greek roots. Mataios — vain, futile, to no purpose. And nostos — a homecoming, a return; the same root that gives us nostalgia. The Greeks understood that a nostos was always partly a doomed errand, since neither the home nor the one returning to it ever stays the same. Mataionostia, then, is the vain return — the homecoming to a place that no longer exists, made over and over by someone who knows it no longer exists.

There’s been an ocean of ink spilled on the importance of living in the now — and rightly, since the present is the only state that truly exists. Even the past is reached only through the present; memory itself happens now. So what keeps us pressed up against that translucent wall, straining for a glimpse of the road not taken?

Here’s what I’ve come to suspect: the pull isn’t backward at all. Something very present is trying to get our attention, and it’s using the past to do it.

That particular musical path is gone for me — but the connection to music, and what it represents (an essay for another time), is a permanent feature of my soul. It still needs to find expression, no matter how many years have passed. It’s a reservoir of energy behind a valve that’s been shut for a long time, and when the pressure finds no outlet, it goes looking for the place where the flow stopped. That place is the fork. So the mind returns me there, again and again — not to torment me, but to knock on the door it was closed behind.

Which means the word may be a little wrong. I called it the vain return. But the returning isn’t vain at all. It’s the most honest part of me, refusing to be silenced — still asking to be let out.

I’ll never meet that musician. But the thing that made me want to be him is still here, still mine. And maybe that’s what mataionostia really is: not grief for a life you didn’t live, but a message from the part of you that’s still alive in it.

So the next time you find yourself back at that crossroads you haunt, it might be worth asking a different question. Not what if I had chosen otherwise — that road is dark and will stay dark. But: what is the part of me that keeps coming here, and what does it still want? The fork isn’t asking you to undo your life. It’s asking you to finish something.

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Q: What part of you keeps knocking — and what would it take to finally let it speak?

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