You have exquisite taste for a man who has produced nothing but opinions about other people's work.

This is the line for the person whose entire portfolio is a well argued opinion about somebody else's film. Taste is cheap. It costs you nothing but an evening and a subscription, and it requires no courage whatsoever, which is precisely why you have cultivated so much of it. You have learned to be a magnificent audience, to nod with the correct amount of knowing pleasure, to say the word curation without flinching, and somewhere along the way you mistook that performance of discernment for an actual talent. It is not. Any fool can point at a thing and pronounce it overrated; the world is thick with them, and you are merely one more voice in a very crowded pew. Meanwhile the people you so generously assess have finished something, published something, risked looking foolish in public, and you have risked nothing at all except a slightly raised eyebrow. The word produced is the knife here, because it names the exact absence you have spent years papering over with adjectives. It lands best when you are midway through explaining why the adaptation failed, or when somebody asks what you have made lately and you hear yourself begin with a well, I am more of a. There you are. The whole confession, in one unfinished sentence.