Yesterday was December 1. There was a heaviness in me that I could not fully name. It was neither sadness nor anger. It felt as if my mind wanted to say something but could not finish its own sentence.

Inside that heaviness, I forced myself to think. For some time I had been aware of a simple truth: I am a philosophy writer who has never sold a single book.

Accepting this brings both a strange peace and a strange pain. It is not easy for a person to look at themselves and realize that, despite all their effort, something is still missing. But yesterday, as I walked around that missing piece, something became clear.

I should have been a novelist. I should have created characters, stepped into them, traveled with their sorrows and their hopes. This was not something I understood for the first time yesterday. I had made that decisi ...