"See My Show" Syndrome
A soft diagnosis of the pressure to promote.
A quick “hi” to all the new subscribers who joined this week. Your responses to the Versailles piece meant more than you know. And with next week marking one full year of The Fourth Wall, your timing couldn’t be better. But more on that soon. ♥️
If you’ve made creative work in the past decade, you’ve probably seen or felt the slow collision of process and promotion.
The moment a project becomes public—tickets on sale, dates announced, graphics shared—a low-grade pressure kicks in. A sense that your job now includes not just making the thing, but helping to move it.
That knot isn’t new. College productions, concerts, readings, workshops, fundraisers, regional runs—the same questions always surface. Should I post about this? How often? Does it help? Does it look like too much? Will people think I’m begging? Will the team think I’m doing enough?
Over time, those small internal negotiations begin to take on a shape of their own. A sort of condition. A phenomenon without a name.
So this week, I want to give it one. A working title: “See My Show” Syndrome. A way to trace where this pressure comes from, what it does to artists, and how we might learn to navigate it with more gentleness.
Let’s start with a soft diagnosis.
The Diagnosis
If I had to put “See My Show” Syndrome on a medical chart, it would live somewhere between hope and responsibility. It shows up in actors, musicians, designers, directors, choreographers, playwrights, producers—anyone whose work eventually steps into public view. In the Age of Visibility, participation creates a subtle sense of duty. If you helped make it, some part of you feels accountable for who walks through the door.
Put more simply, it’s the inherent pressure artists feel to promote the work they make.
The Symptoms
There are four main ways that the syndrome shows up in the body. They’re small, quiet, and so familiar that they’re easy to miss.
The first is what I’ve come to think of as the negotiation loop. On the surface, the behavior looks simple: posting the poster, sharing the ticket link, resharing reviews. But beneath those gestures is a cycle of inner negotiations. You want to support the work. You don’t want to seem overeager. You want people to come. You don’t want to exhaust them. You want the show to succeed. You don’t want to become a billboard. These opposing impulses become a steady thump-thump we feel even while we’re doing the thing we love.
Another is the background scan. Over time, the brain starts tracking things you never gave it permission to track. You clock the likes on posts. You notice who viewed your stories. You remember which friends were “so excited” to come and never bought tickets. None of this takes over your day, but it gathers in the margins, shaping how you feel when you open your phone between shows or on your way to work.
Then there’s the scarcity trigger—the flare that happens when ticket sales dip or houses feel light. Even if you know audience behavior is complex and unpredictable, the emotional leap is immediate: if the seats are empty, I didn’t do enough. We connect dots for a living; when a clear cause doesn’t present itself, we cast ourselves as the culprit.
And finally, there’s the identity drift. Because we’re constantly reminded that an artist’s online presence is part of their “brand,” support for the show starts to tangle with self-worth. A post about tickets becomes, somewhere in the back of our minds, a post about our own value. The question drifts from does anyone care about this thing I’m doing? to the far more vulnerable does anyone care about me?
Interestingly, none of these symptoms are driven by ego or neediness. They’re the emotional residue left by years of invisible micro-decisions—each shaped by a culture that, more and more, asks artists to be both the makers and messengers of the work.
The Cause
If the symptoms live in the body, the cause lives in the culture we’re working inside of. “See My Show” Syndrome is born from the modern overlap of scarcity, visibility, responsibility, and love—forces that weren’t designed to coexist but now sit shoulder to shoulder in every rehearsal room, backstage hallway, and marketing meeting.
The scarcity part is nothing new. Theater has always operated on thin margins and short timelines. But when you combine that with the Age of Visibility—where the work doesn’t end when the curtain falls—sharing stops being a generous gesture and starts feeling like part of the job.
The same is true of our artistic instincts. Digging for nuance, asking hard questions, tracking subtle shifts—these skills serve the work. But when you layer on things like public grosses, online chatter, and the ever-present hum of the algorithm, all of that external feedback starts turning into internal narratives. Not because we’re fragile, but because we’re trained to care about our impact.
This convergence of creativity and commerce—of numbers and narratives—makes systemic pressure feel personal..
Understanding the cause doesn’t make the syndrome or the symptoms disappear. But it does give us a clearer map of what the remedies might look like.
The Remedies
As much as I’d love to provide prescriptive answers, I think what’s required might be more like re-orientations. Shifts in how we hold what we’re experiencing.
Start simple by remembering the scale of things. The show is bigger than any one person. The audience is bigger than any one algorithm. The forces that shape a run—timing, taste, weather, word-of-mouth—move in ways no single individual can steer. When we widen the frame, our part in the picture takes its true size: meaningful, but not all-powerful. It’s kind of a relief to realize we were never meant to carry the whole thing.
Another is reclaiming intention. Sharing about the work can be joyful, connective, electric—when it comes from desire rather than duty. There’s a big difference between “I must” and “I’m moved to.” One pulls you out of yourself; the other roots you deeper inside the experience you’re actually having. When the impulse is light rather than heavy, the act of sharing becomes easy and maybe even fun?
There’s also something to be said for letting the work be the work. Not everything needs to be captured, posted, or pushed. Some moments are meant to be lived, not broadcast. When you allow parts of the process to remain unmediated, the center of gravity returns to the here and now—to the people in front of you. Not every step has to serve the machinery.
And maybe the most healing remedy is returning to Why We Theater: the invisible handoff at the center of all this. The part untouched by marketing, metrics, or momentum. Night after night, artists and audiences make a quiet energetic exchange. And when we return our attention to that—the thing that can only exist in the room—the pressure to “move the needle” loosens its grip. We stop trying to control the invitation and start tending to the encounter.
If we can do that—if we can gently reclaim our agency from algorithms and expectations—“See My Show” Syndrome becomes less of an emergency and something far more manageable. A condition of being visible, being vulnerable, being an artist. A reminder to return to the room, where the real medicine lives.
One last thing…
I’ve had this piece sitting in drafts for a while. I wasn’t sure how to approach this strange new straddle so many of us are doing—the space between creating work and sharing it, between the craft and the call to promote it.
Something shifted a few weeks ago when I posted a short video about BEAU’s ticket sales. All I said was that even with our producing and marketing teams doing everything humanly possible, we were still having a hard time getting butts in seats.
I hesitated before posting it. I wasn’t sure if it was my place. And yet I felt that familiar tug—as someone with a tiny platform, and someone leading the show—to say something. To help in whatever way I could.
No one asked me to do it. And because of that, I questioned myself. Would it come across as desperate? Ungrateful? Would I be stepping on toes? Would anyone even care?
Sitting with all of that is what brought me back to this idea of “See My Show” Syndrome. To the knot I’ve felt since college, trying to convince people to come see the miscast cabaret we’d cobbled together. It’s not new. It’s just louder now—more constant, more collective. Every artist I know who’s in a show or putting up a concert is navigating some version of these same questions. It feels baked into the job in a way it never used to.
I guess writing this was my way of saying, simply: you’re not imagining it. And you’re not alone.
So here’s to continuing to navigate the labyrinth of modern show business, together.
Side by side by side by side.
See you next week ♥️
—Matt