Stop Your Engines
The race you think you're losing doesn't have a finish line.
This Sunday, someone wins.
A handful of names get called in a room full of people who—on some level—wanted to hear their own. And the rest of us watch. From couches, from bar stools, from dressing rooms in cities that are not New York, doing a kind of subconscious math.
Where am I in all this? Am I where I should be? Am I falling behind?
It's the most natural question in the world this time of year. And I want to take it seriously—not dismiss it, not spiritual-bypass it, not wrap it in a bow. Because the question is real. The feeling is real.
But I think we've been measuring ourselves on the wrong axis entirely.
Let's get into it.
Caissie Levy is currently starring (and slaying) in Ragtime—deep in the arena where, if there was a race, you'd say she was winning it.
In an interview with Paul Wontorek, she talked about her Broadway debut. Back when she was, in her words, "just trying to hang." Trying to be "a version of a Broadway actor, whatever that was."
She described spending a lot of that time—her phrase—"looking left and right." At the women "ahead" of her. Wanting to be like them.
We all do this. The involuntary audit of everyone in our peripheral vision. Who booked what. Who's in what room. Who got the thing you wanted. Caissie was generous about it, actually—she didn't call it a flaw. She called it what young artists do: you model your career off the people you want to become, because you don't yet have your own shape to go on, so you borrow theirs.
Which is true. And probably has been amplified by about a thousand orders of magnitude.
The glance used to be occasional.
Social media is the sideways glance rebuilt as infrastructure—a machine whose entire job is to turn your head for you, all day, toward the workshop you didn't get, the reading you're not in, the regional contract, the callback, the carousel of someone else's great month. Scroll is just a fancy word for look again. And again. And again.
All of it running on the same axis: ahead and behind. Left and right. Where am I relative to them.
And then once a year, the whole thing gets a broadcast.
The Tonys make the race look real.
The Tony Awards, ostensibly, are a prize for singularity—for the voice that sounded like no other voice, the choice no one else would have made. The thing that was so specific, so unrepeatable, that a room full of voters had no choice but to stop and say: that.
But the way the entire ecosystem chases it is by becoming more alike. Sanding toward the recognizable shape of the "Broadway voice," the "Broadway body," the "Broadway whatever." Everyone scanning the people who got "the thing", trying to move in their direction.
It's an award for being unrepeatable, pursued by imitation.
And that's not a flaw in the system. That's what happens when everyone is running on the same horizontal axis (ahead and behind, left and right). Horizontal motion moves you toward other people. It crowds you together. It erases the specific.
But the thing the award is actually trying to honor? That lives somewhere else entirely.
Think about what made the performances you remember. The ones that made you hold your breath.
It wasn't proximity to a type. It wasn't successful imitation of what came before. It was depth. It was someone who had gone so far into themselves—into their training, their questions, their specific and irreplaceable inner life—that they arrived somewhere no one else could have reached, because no one else was them.
That motion isn't horizontal. It's vertical.
Below: the training, the teachers, the failures and sacrifies absorbed and metabolized—all the shoulders you're standing on.
Above: the thing this was always supposed to be in service of. Something bigger than applause. Older than attention. Faith, maybe, or the particular shape of your own devotion to the work.
Inside: the knot of your experiences and memories and skills and quirks—immeasurable, intangible, impossible to fully see. You spend a life untangling it. And what you tend to find, and forget, and find again, is that the thing at the center isn't talent or technique. It's something inherently whole. Something that connects you to everyone else who has ever stood in front of an audience and tried to tell the truth.
That's the vertical axis. And here's what makes it structurally different from the horizontal one:
You cannot race on it.
There's no ahead or behind on a vertical axis. There's only deeper or shallower, more connected or less. And the distance between you and your deepest self has nothing—nothing—to do with who's standing to your left or your right.
Which brings me to the strange trap at the center of all this.
The Tonys are designed for the horizontal axis. Campaigns, comparisons, competitive seasons. That's the structure. And then the award goes to the person who most fully escaped it. Who went so deep on the vertical axis that they became unrepeatable.
We are running horizontally in pursuit of a prize that only goes to people who stopped running horizontally.
That's not meant to be a cynical observation. The pursuit of the thing the Tonys are actually trying to name has very little to do with Tony season. It happens in rehearsal rooms and late-night journals and the years of small unglamorous work that build the specific person you are. It happens when you ask harder questions instead of looking for easier answers. It happens on the vertical axis.
The horizontal race will keep running. The Feed will keep feeding. The nominations will keep dropping and the math will probably keep happening in your head.
But you can absolutely opt out of treating the horizontal axis as the one that measures your worth.
So if you're nominated on Sunday: congratulations, genuinely. What a remarkable achievement. And also—the thing you actually have walks back out of that room with you, exactly as intact as it walked in. No statue adds to it. Nothing taken away if it doesn't come.
And if you're watching from the couch with that familiar low hum of will I ever be there—hear me when I say: you cannot fall behind on the vertical axis. You can only be further from yourself or closer to yourself. That's the whole thing.
The industry will keep running its race. Let it.
You've got vertical work to do.
This week in One Last Thing: why I needed to write this.
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