To Be Nominated
An honor? Really?
On a Tuesday in April, I found out that our show, BEAU, had been nominated for a Drama Desk Award. Ten nominations in total—tied for the most of any production this season.
I know what that sentence is supposed to do. I know the gracious-losing language that follows it: it’s an honor just to be nominated. I’ve heard it and quietly filed it under polite nothings. We all decided, somewhere along the way, that it’s what you say before the real winner gets announced.
But something about that Tuesday morning made me want to sit with the phrase instead of letting it pass. Because I think it’s pointing at something real—something most of us experience but don’t have great language for. And I think it has everything to do with a distinction we almost never make.
We are, collectively, pretty suspicious of external validation.
The self-help canon is unanimous: don’t need it. Build your interior. Know your worth independent of outcome, recognition, or applause. We’ve turned “I don’t need external validation” into a kind of emotional maturity badge. And there’s real wisdom in that. There’s a version of external validation that functions like addiction—the reach for proof that you’re enough, the relief that arrives and almost immediately dissolves, leaving you searching for the next hit. Anyone who’s refreshed their phone after posting something knows exactly what that feels like.
But here’s what the conventional wisdom misses: it treats external validation as a single thing. One experience with one function.
It isn’t.
There are two fundamentally different things that can happen when the outside world responds to your work. The first is the one we’re warned about—validation that fills a hole. You weren’t sure the work was good. You weren’t sure you were good. The recognition arrives and answers the question, at least temporarily. It tells you something you didn’t already know.
The second is different. It’s validation that confirms something already true. The belief was already there. The pride was solid before anyone else weighed in. The recognition doesn’t fill anything—it meets something. Agrees with something. Reflects back something you were already carrying.
These feel nothing alike in the body. The first feels like relief. The second feels like something I’ve been trying to find the right word for since nominations were announced—somewhere between overwhelming and surreal. Not because you’re surprised by the confirmation. Because you’ve been holding the belief alone long enough that anyone agreeing feels like you’ve suddenly got company.
This doesn’t happen automatically. You don’t arrive at the confirmation kind of validation without first doing something harder: holding belief in your work privately, without evidence, through the stretches when the evidence isn’t coming and the world isn’t paying attention.
BEAU closed for the second time in January. Two runs off-Broadway, each demanding in ways I didn’t fully anticipate—physically, emotionally, in every direction. When it ended, I didn’t have a clean takeaway. Some experiences leave you with more texture than certainty. The world moved on quickly, the way it does. The conversations stopped. Nobody was talking about the show anymore.
But the belief didn’t close with it. We kept carrying the pride in what we made, the conviction that it was worth making, the knowledge of what every single person in that building gave to a little show that many people still have never heard of. That kind of faith doesn’t ask for evidence. It doesn’t negotiate. It just holds.
That private period—the stretch of carrying belief without confirmation—is exactly what makes the second kind of validation possible. You can’t have the alignment without first having the interior. The outside can only meet something that’s already there.
But even when the belief is solid—independent, not in need of anyone’s agreement—something still shifts when the outside finally confirms it. Not your conviction. Not your confidence in the work. Something subtler.
Maybe it’s that we can’t fully hold something true in total isolation. Maybe belief, at some level, wants to be witnessed. Not to exist. Not to be real. But to become fully inhabitable. To be something you can stand inside of, rather than just carry.
When the nominations came out and the names of the people who made our show got called—the lighting and the sound and the direction and the words and the music—I didn’t feel vindicated. I didn’t feel like I’d finally been proven right. I felt, strangely, less alone in something I’d already known.
That’s the thing the conventional wisdom about external validation can’t account for. The version it warns you about is real. But so is this other version—the one that doesn’t create belief, only meets it.
Maybe that’s what makes the phrase worth saving. Not “it’s an honor to be nominated” as consolation prize language. But honor in the older sense—acknowledgment that arrives not as charity but as recognition. The difference between being seen and being noticed. Between a handshake and a pat on the head.
So yes. I do think it is, in fact, truly (and literally) an honor just to be nominated.
See you next week ♥️
—Matt