It dawned on me awhile back that my most beloved professional and recreational activities in life all share the word “shoot”: pool, basketball, and especially film.

That language which sublimates the violent collision of a bullet meeting a body finds its way into my favorite pastimes is slightly unsettling and cause for reflection. It calls to mind other phrases so often brandished in show-business that their usage is banal, conversational in its brutality: a record that does well is a “hit”, a successful play a “smash”; comedians “slay”; a good performer in any medium “kills it”. On the other hand, the lingo for whatever reason remains confined to property damage, assault, and mere homicide—some wrongs are too great, some crimes too grave: a stand-out theater company doesn’t subject the arts scene to a “holocaust”, a writer with a deft use of words doesn’t “enslave” the readership, and a stirring actor doesn’t “rape it” on stage.

I can only take the selective language we entertainers use to describe our greatest greatnesses to mean that we’re a vulnerable breed, and have all decided to do the same thing about it: get famous so the people who’ve done us wrong over the years have to hear of, and read about, and watch us. Languages of groups reflect the experiences of the individuals in them. As slick politicians speak stereotypically in vagaries because they’re subject to public perception of every little move they make, so too is the culture of people who are socialized to suffer loudly and strive relentlessly reflected in the vengeful language we employ to describe achievement. On the other hand, the metaphors we use are violent right until a brink of immorality that can be broached but never crossed; like all people fueled by past slights, the pain which drove us to create can only spend itself after so much revenge. Of the slick politician, we eventually expect a candid memoir; and after a few years of telling us how ambitious and relentless and cut throat they had to be to get you to see their painting, film, or performance, we understandably want our greatest artists to stop talking about themselves in a certain way.

It took me years to get comfortable in my own skin, as it might have taken you. We spend the first quarter of our lives being told what we are while we’re making who we are. The messages come from parallel, intersecting, and crooked lines of communication—lovers, parents, friends, and strangers with angles to figure—and we’re alone to negotiate the complicated emotional geometry of our private lives. I was no different. I was “long-winded” while I discovered and polished my love of writing, of words; “dense” when discovering that I’d found a second home in history books; “obsessive” while I learned to edit film; “detached” when I decided that reacting to things that happen in the moment was no way for me to live; just plain “crazy” for preferring high-stakes and competitive endeavor to leisure; and “oddly bossy” and “basically autistic” as the goal-oriented reality of being a director of narrative films took over more and more of my time and psyche.

Then, one day, or one year, the messages stopped; or you stop paying attention to them. You know who and what it is that you are, creatively and personally. You’ve won: either by default, through sheer attrition and stubbornness, or outright, with your success. Because you’ve been who you are for so long, people who know you give up on trying to change you, and people who don’t know you have to deal with you where you’re at; words that used to hurt now make you laugh, and insults sound like compliments; people recognize you and give you acclaim in public for all the things you are in private, and all the things you were in private. This year, I was nominated by The Stranger, one of the more timely and lively news and arts publications in Seattle, for a “Genius Award”. Every year, the paper gives out one of them to a creator who has had a banner year or, as I understand it, a bang-up career in 5 separate artistic categories, of which film is one.

The competition is between me and people who are in many ways more established than I am; wonderful filmmakers and decent people with multinational distribution deals and regular appearances in the NY Times; what makes the nomination so great is that I’d looked up to them and enjoyed their work before this year—posted and re-posted their work and write-ups on my Facebook page, gave modest amounts to their Kickstarters. While it’s amazing to’ve been incidentally put in the same class with older filmmakers whose work I love and look up to, anyone who knows me well knows how much I hate losing to anyone. One summer, a friend of mine beat me like a rug at pool after a shoot; I practiced all summer to get to the point where I’d expect to win against people I knew I was better than, and find ways to weasel close games and lucky wins from people that were better than me. I was socialized to become a man by my dad during our countless hours of watching basketball on TV; the moral universe of sport is stark and unforgiving, and I’ve taken my cues.

There’s one sense in which being nominated for something is validation in and of itself: some teams make the playoffs and are in contention for championships every year, in the same way that there are hundreds of filmmakers in any given metropolitan-area, but only 3 of them have a chance at winning on this particular award. Seattle has a film scene that, over the last 2 years, is regularly mentioned in the top-5 of those “Best Places To Make Film” lists that appear in magazines; to receive a nomination for an award given out by one of the best papers in the city matters. In the 4 months since I’ve been nominated, people look at you a little differently, listen a little closer, and expect a little more. Meanwhile, you’re more or less the same person after getting recognition as you were before—in my case, a long-winded, oddly bossy, basically autistic filmmaker who stays up at night thinking of what filmmakers who are just starting out will do to be better than me, and who goes to work during the day to keep pace with the ones that already are. I want to say that we’re all winners for being there, for being nominated, and at a very deep and fundamental I believe that to be true. But something about my temperament that I’ve accepted just a short while ago—something that I used to be discouraged from cultivating, but something that is ultimately responsible for having done well enough to received this nomination—won’t allow me to say that unequivocally.

This particular year, the Stranger has decided to make the nominations for this award a matter of suspense, of theater; all nominees were notified 4 months in advance of an award ceremony at which the winners will be revealed in front of thousands of people, literally the day after this writing. What awaits at the ceremony is a stage, with an audience that paid good money to be slain. My perception of the perception people will come away from the event with is that a winner wins, and that one can still somehow lose by having been one of 3 nominees in a pool of hundreds; not everyone thinks of it this way, but, again, I take my cues from the spectacle of sport. Tomorrow, 5 people will walk away with the award, and everyone else there won’t. You’ll see the pity on peoples’ faces as you shuffle out of the theatre; celebration will take place in the same space as quiet dejection; some people will leave with $5,000 dollars they didn’t have 2 hours earlier, and others will leave thinking of what to tell the landlord on Monday. The gutless will leave without congratulating the winner; those with a real sense of gamesmanship and respect for the collective endeavor of making films can’t wait to do the opposite. It’s going to be an amazing spectacle, but I feel able to put in perspective because something about it feels strangely familiar—a feeling analogous to opening night of one of your films, to the feeling right before you yell action, to the feeling of having 60 or 30 or 7 days to meet a creative deadline.

Entertainers are among the bravest people you’ll ever know for this, if this alone: we’ve given up all pretension to anonymity, or at least more of it than everyone else except maybe politicians and athletes, who in any case are performers just like us. We live on a tight-rope no one else dares to; the threat of a fall is an occupational hazard that happens often, and we fall to climb and climb again. Woody Allen has a remarkable act from his days of stand-up called “Second Marriage”; it’s pure show-business—the rejection, the transparency, the need for validation, the creative triumph of someone whose life is more or less public record—it’s all there, and I listen to it whenever I feel not just discouraged, but more often when I feel I’m taking myself or my work too seriously—the best performances, to my eye, are a compelling mix of flippancy and gravity; the goal is to “smash”, but not “enslave”.

The best known part of the act in Woody’s routine ends with the raconteur saying—half-jokingly, if at all—that he can’t continue because his recollections were “too personal”. There’s a reason that the instinct to recoil found its way into the punchline, and precious few have a perspective on why. To the general audience at the time, it was a real “hit”; as another entertainer, it caught me as something closer to a hug, or a trans-generational fist-bump—someone whose been through the ropes reminding me that this is the life we chose: the life where marriage is material and family life is fodder, where you win at your career when you capitalize creatively on losing in life, and where people fall in love with you while you try your damndest to kill them.