You can want recognition without making every unrecognized effort feel wasted.

Wanting to be seen is not vanity, and denying the wish produces a strained modesty that convinces nobody. The trouble starts when recognition becomes the only evidence that something counted, because most of what anyone does goes unwitnessed. On that accounting, nearly your whole life would be waste, which cannot be right.

Let the wish be reasonable when it turns up. Then ask separately what a piece of work was worth to you, in what it taught or fixed, and answer that question without an audience in it.