When it’s Time to Choose Presence over Perfection

While Lexi Toye was a talented dancer, she was haunted by a secret that kept her from sharing her true voice. This is how finding her voice and letting go of perfection led her to become a dancer in Hamilton and beyond.

content warning: eating disorder

Anyone who knew Lexi Garcia of DeBary, Florida would have probably described her as practically perfect in every way. But Lexi had a secret, and no one knew. No one. Her happiness cast out like a film projector on a blank wall, larger than life, seeming almost real, until it got blocked by a shadow.

Lexi kept this secret from the age of seven to eighteen. For 11 years, she didn’t allow anyone to see who she really was. For 11 years, a part of her remained hidden. Or perhaps trapped.

The secret started when she was seven years old, growing up in the heart of American diet culture. She saw her mom counting calories, weighing food, measuring portions, and Lexi wanted to copy her. She loved the feeling of control. Even at seven, she was seemingly aware of how little power she had in this world, and from a young age she was on high alert, looking for ways to survive in a big world in which you felt so small.

Lexi spent much of her life putting food on scales and then putting herself on them. By the time she was a teenager, she weighed herself multiple times a day, always trying to get the numbers “right.” For a long time, this looked like eating less. And then, it looked like throwing up.

No one in Lexi’s life, including her dance teachers, ever said anything malicious about her body, but her mind would interpret phrases like “use your core” to mean, “I’m fat, I’m lazy.

By her senior year, in addition to her nonstop dance classes, she says, “I was on such a crazy schedule of throwing up, overdosing on laxatives, restricted eating, and over-exercising.”

On the outside, Lexi seemed like she had her life together. From the outside, she did. But that kind of perfection is almost always hiding something, isolating the very person who seems to be doing well at everything. “I was lying so much,” she says. “It was a facade. I wasn’t ever honest with my voice. I was never vocalizing what I actually needed. I was never vocalizing what was going on behind closed doors. I was performing so hard and heavy to make everybody like me, to be the positive sunshiny high-energy person.”

The act of seeming perfect, seeming like you have it all together, can be all-consuming. The upkeep of the image of a perfect life becomes your life, and then that life stops being yours.  It becomes a mirage of what you think others expect of you, and it robs you of truly connecting, of truly being seen. But your fear screams that your worthiness hinges on this image, and to lose it would be to lose everything.

Lexi spent almost her entire life before college hiding her eating disorder from everyone, and she hid it well.

No one knew.

“I did not get any acting training,” Lexi says, “but I was acting my face off growing up because I was fooling everybody that I was more than okay—very bubbly, very confident, very comfortable—but I was the furthest thing from it. I was a ticking time bomb.”

“You’re not good enough.”

Lexi and I meet at a coffee shop for the interview, and while it’s the first time we sit down to talk, it’s the third time I’ve been in a room with her.

The first time I saw her was in a workshop performance of the musical Whiskeyland at the Orlando Fringe Festival. The second was when I took a dance class with her just a few days ago. But today is the first time I meet her when she’s not wearing dance shoes.

Instead, she’s wearing Doc Marten boots with tiny flowers on them that almost match the purple and yellow flowers just outside the floor-to-ceiling windows of the corner we’re sitting in. It’s gray outside but the singular string bulbs overhead, and the way Lexi’s eyes curl up when she smiles, make it seem like it’s another sunny Florida day.

We sit on leather chairs across from each other. I set my chamomile tea down to cool. She’s almost finished her iced coffee, and sometimes she shakes the ice when she talks.

While our drink orders differ today, we have a lot in common. Lexi and I both grew up in the small Florida town of DeBary (population was about 16,000 when I last lived there). We both are Latina, we both are about the same height (petite), we both know all the words to Hamilton, and we’re both wearing blue jeans ripped at the knees.

When I first connected with Lexi on Instagram and learned that she was both from DeBary and had danced in Hamilton on Broadway, I just had to know more. I’ve profiled many people on Broadway, but I couldn’t get the idea of someone from DeBary making it to Broadway. How does that happen? It’s not that it seemed impossible. It’s just that it seemed…unlikely. But Lexi had done it. And I wanted to know how. Maybe it was because my childhood dream was to be Belle on Broadway, but more likely it was because I sensed she shared some of my small-town-big-dreams tendencies, and I wanted to know how they played out in her life and how they led her to Hamilton, especially since my big dreams led me there too (in 2016 I went backstage and profiled a few of the original cast members). It just seemed like we should meet, and it seemed like I should write about it.

Technically, I was born in Orlando but lived most of my young life in DeBary. The first thing I learn when I meet Lexi is that she was also born in Orlando, and then her parents moved to DeBary. (Later we realize our childhood homes are 1.4 miles apart.)

I took dance classes before kindergarten and so did she. But while I only dabbled in a class here or there, Lexi danced Monday to Friday after school until 9:30pm, and then on Saturdays from 9 to 5.

Time management was difficult, but internally she has always enjoyed the pleasure of getting things done, especially to a high quality. She learned how to manage her time at an early age from watching her mom, whose dream, Lexi explains, was to be a mom. (That was my mom’s dream too.) Lexi is one of five kids, and observant as she was, she noticed how her mom would map out every bagged lunch, every route for karate drop offs and dance pick ups. Lexi could see how organization (and doing something out of love, because of a dream) could help you keep going, help you broaden your capacity.

But the problem was that Lexi wasn’t only relying on love to keep her going. She was also relying on control. Her eating disorder was in full swing, and hiding it was a full-time job.Lexi says this need to control and hide came from somewhere deep inside, not from anything her parents or friends or teachers said or did. Her parents always said they loved her no matter what, and only cared that she tried.

But unfortunately, perfectionism can twist almost anything to sound like “you’re not good enough.” Perfectionism can contort “try your best” into “try harder.”The eating disorder went on quietly in the background while Lexi danced, did homework, and smiled at everyone.

“She saved my life.”

Hannah told Lexi she’d be there for her and help her get help. The first thing Lexi needed to do, Hannah said, was tell her mom.

“It was so terrifying to tell my mom,” Lexi says, pulling at the tiny frays in her jeans above her left knee, “because we were so close. But I had lied to my mom. I had been betraying my own self.”

Once Lexi told her mom, her mom signed her up for intensive therapy, and she and her mom read books together by authors like Brené Brown and Glennon Doyle, and would talk about them with each other each night.

What they found in those books was the opposite of diet culture, shame, shrinking and hiding.

For the first time Lexi found words for emotions she’d never known before. Those words—like empathy, vulnerability, and boundaries—helped her consider what it might be like to show the world who she really was, what it might be like to use her voice for expression instead of as a mask for suppression.

Lexi tried it on slowly, first revealing her real feelings to the people closest to her. She was surprised to see that even if what she had to say was “awful and ugly,” the people around her didn’t think she was “the worst person in the world,” as her fears told her they would.

In fact, she laughs as she tells me how her older brother said to her once, “You’re not a snowflake. You’re not the first person to come up with these emotions or experiences.” She laughs because he said it in a brotherly matter-of-fact way, but what it meant to her was “you’re not alone.” Now when she thinks or feels something awful, she reminds herself that she isn’t the only one. That in fact, if she chooses to share, she might even help someone else.

Before this, she almost never expressed any negative emotions at all, to anyone. “I was always just ‘happy,’” she says, “and there’s more to life than that.”

“You are doing it right now.”

Lexi got the help she needed (and still continues to go to therapy weekly, reads books, and seeks support from those who love her), and began to very slowly to let the world see who she really was.

Once it came time for her to move to New York City to begin college, she was in a better place. She couldn’t wait to dance now with this new sense of freedom. But she still didn’t plan on dance being her career.  For her, the BFA was a way for her to dance longer, not a way to pay the bills.

If she only had four more years of dance in her life, then, she wanted to make the most of it. She danced all the time, got every student discounted ticket she could to watch professional dancers on Broadway, and auditioned for summer programs that would allow her to keep dancing even when classes were out.

During the summer of her sophomore year, she did a program with a modern dance company and found herself asking the choreographer (and owner of the company) so many questions about dancing for a living, including how to network, how to book jobs, how to make a career in dance. It inspired her to meet someone who was actually dancing for a living, and for a moment her curiosity outweighed her doubts.

And when Lexi asked this choreographer how to network and make a living in dance, he looked at her kindly and said, “You are doing it right now.”

It was a revelation. She was often ashamed in these situations, always felt like she was “too much,” asked too many questions and asked for help too often. She saw a lot of those traits as part of her anxiety. One of the hardest parts of perfectionism recovery is throwing away the perfectionist tendencies without trashing yourself in the process.

Not everything about Lexi was rooted in control or perfectionism or anxiety or an eating disorder. In fact, those things hid who she really was. And while perhaps she might have once appeared overeager as a way to mask her pain, her genuine eagerness was not a bad thing.

That drive and willingness and openness and inquiring spirit coupled with belief instead of fear is what would take her to Broadway.

That choreographer was one of the first people to reflect back to her that she was enough. It was the first time she was able to consider that maybe she didn’t need to try harder. Maybe she already was doing enough. Maybe all she needed was to keep going. Keep asking for help. Keep moving towards what lit her up.

She already had everything she needed. “It might not be technical,” she says, “but if I’m raw and authentic and just ask questions, that’s going to connect me to the artist I want to be and connect me with the artists I want to be around.”

That was the moment Lexi decided to pursue her deeply buried dream of being a professional dancer.

She told her advisor that she was ready to pursue a career in dance—cruises, music videos, concerts, movies, commercials, dance companies. “If dance was involved,” she says, “I was gonna go for it.”

Her advisor praised the energy but said, “being a little bit more focused might help you get further.”

Lexi was confused at first—she was ready to do anything. But she took the advice seriously and thought that if it was indeed better to direct all this energy in one place instead of all over the place, then maybe she should take some time to think about what direction she’d like to go in.

That’s when she realized the clues were there all along.

“Well, here goes nothing.”

In New York, Lexi always went to Broadway shows in her free time. When she tells me she saw Mary Poppins twice, I ask her if she happened to see Ashley Brown, who originated the role of Mary Poppins on Broadway.

Lexi did, and when I tell her that Ashley was the first artist I ever profiled, she holds her hand to her heart and says, “I’m gonna geek out. I have zero chill.” She loves Ashley Brown and says, “I’m just in awe of the courage and gusto and vulnerability to use your voice,” as she touches her exposed right knee. I assume Lexi is in awe of Ashley’s incredible voice and artistry the same way I am. When she says, “I kiss the ground she walks on” I think it’s just a fun way of showing her appreciation for such a beautiful talent. But later I’ll learn it goes much deeper than that.

Since Broadway is what Lexi loved and was already doing in her free time, she decided to focus her energy there. She had never sung or acted, but she thought she would just figure that out. While Lexi sometimes struggled with perfectionist tendencies, she was not an overthinker when it came to her dreams.  It almost seems as if allowing herself to dream big is one of the few forces that shuts up her perfectionism and allows the beautiful parts of her ambition to punch through—the parts that believe she is capable, the parts that know it doesn’t need to be perfect now, or ever.

She chose Broadway as her north star, but she knew it wasn’t common to just graduate college and get a job dancing on Broadway, so after she graduated she auditioned for a cruise in hopes to get a paying dance job and build up her resume.

The audition started like any other. Lexi did contemporary, jazz, tap, and improv choreography. But then she was asked to do something she’d never been asked to do before.

Lexi didn’t know that this audition included singing, and they gave Lexi sheet music and asked her to learn a song and perform it live for the casting directors.

“That was the first time in my entire life,” Lexi explains, “that I had ever used my voice.”

“Wait,” I ask, “do you mean in an audition? Or are you saying you never sang before?”

“Never.”

“In the car? In the shower? Happy Birthday?”

“Nope.”

She knew how to use her body, but not her voice. She had never sung a word.

She was terrified to sing and wanted to run away, but she’d already gone this far in the audition, and she needed a job.

She held the crinkled sheet music in her hand and stood in front of the camera they used to film the auditions. But before she started, she said to the casting directors, “I have to tell you, I’m devastated. Because I’ve had the best time dancing for you today. But I’m about to shoot myself in the foot. I’ve never done this before.”

They were incredibly kind and told her not to worry, that there was only one ship in the entire fleet where the dancers had to sing, and they were still hiring plenty of people who would only dance. “You’re fine,” they said, “just give it your all.”

And she thought, “Well, here goes nothing.”

“Are you all singers?”

A month later, she got a phone call offering her a contract to join the Pride of America with the Norwegian cruise line that would go to Hawaii.

She was elated. She was about to be a professional dancer.

Rehearsals were in Tampa, and in a van with everyone on the way to the rehearsal center, the stage manager turned around and said to the group, “Okay so for tomorrow’s rehearsals, wear what you would wear to a singer call. We’ll learn the music, and then the next day we’ll be dancing.”

Lexi looked frantically around the van. There must have been a mistake. Was anyone else freaking out?

Everyone else seemed completely calm.

“What do you wear to a singer call?” she asked, “Are you all singers?”

They were.

“I’m going to get fired,” she thought. “This is the start and the end of my career. Everybody’s going to know I’m a fraud.”

Lexi says her music director, Liz, was incredibly kind and walked her through everything, like where to place the mic, where to place the pack, and how to do a mic check.

When Lexi explains this part, her whole body tenses for a moment. Then she tells the rest of the story.

For the first mic check, each performer has to sing by themselves into the microphone, for as long as it takes to get the volume right.

Lexi had never sung into a microphone.

She had only sang once before, at the audition.

And now her voice was about to be amplified.

She froze, but didn’t want to lose the job, so she sang.

And while she sang, she cried.

“I cry-sang into my mic in front of my whole cast,” she explains.

She says that throughout that rehearsal she cried “like a five-year-old” but she isn’t making light of it. She’s serious. And so were the tears.

She had never sung in her life because, as she would learn later in vocal therapy, pulling air through her gut, into her throat, and then out into the world triggered her body to feel unsafe.

She had spent her lifetime thus far keeping things in or throwing things up.

Releasing her singing voice was too raw, too vulnerable, too much. So she never did it. When everyone else sang happy birthdays she would mouth the words and hope no one noticed she was silent.

When she chose Broadway for a dream, she didn’t quite know how unsafe singing would make her feel until she tried it that day in rehearsal. She didn’t know then what was happening, all she knew was that she couldn’t stop the tears or the shaking. Maybe this dream was beyond her? Maybe she should give up now?

If Lexi’s music director Liz didn’t do what she did next, Lexi might have.

But when Liz saw Lexi cry-singing, she walked up onto to the stage, held both of Lexi’s hands in hers, looked her straight in the eyes, and said, “You’re okay. Just keep going.”

Lexi takes what might be the first deep breath she’s taken in recounting this story after she says that part.

At the mic check she kept singing long enough for the sound engineers to get what they needed. She’s grateful her cast weren’t “a bunch of bullies.” Because if any of them had made her feel any worse than she already did, she would have likely quit her dream. But everyone was kind; she still remembers how, the first time she did a mic check without crying, everyone cheered and applauded.

Lexi kept going and flourished in the cruise job.

Once the cruise contract ended, she went back to New York and started vocal therapy, where she says she had to literally retrain her body to understand that using her voice didn’t mean she was in danger.  Singing triggered a fight or flight mode in her, because, it almost felt as if a secret she was keeping was all of a sudden on full display. “It was hard for me to convince my body,” she explains, that what we were doing (singing) wasn’t harmful or shameful.”

She remembers one vocal therapy session that happened around Christmastime. Her therapist asked her to hum the song “Silent Night.”

But this time, in addition to telling herself that nothing bad was happening, that she was indeed safe, her therapist helped her see that singing was not only not a sign of danger, but a sign of life. Of celebration.

She still remembers the very first time she allowed her stomach to expand and contract fully, during a therapy session when she was taught how to do a full “singer’s breath.”

As she let the air expand her, taking it all in, then letting it all out, she wept. She says it was one of the first times she let her body “do its thing” instead of trying to control it.

“We’re taught to be small or to be fit or to look a certain way,” she says. “To hold yourself in.” But in taking that first full breath, she took up more space, and saw that it was okay.

She says that she spent so many years of her life “stifling honesty and authenticity” that learning how to breathe like a singer helped her build on her other therapies. “One of the first things I worked on at 18 with my therapist,” she explains, “was being vocally honest in the moment, like speaking up when I had questions or saying no.” Part of her healing was learning how to speak up, and she realized she would need those same skills to pursue this dream. “I was using those pipes so destructively. There was a huge shift, a retraining process, that I chose to do in order to do this crazy career path that included singing.”

“I got fired.”

In addition to vocal therapy, Lexi took singing lessons, dance classes, and kept going on auditions (in addition to working three jobs). “You’re always training,” she says of the professional dancer life.

Then she booked her first Equity regional theater job (Mamma Mia in Wisconsin), and working alongside people who had been on Broadway before gave her confidence.

And then Hamilton opened.

Like millions of others, Lexi listened to the cast album on repeat. She still didn’t sing out loud to herself, but she silently mouthed the words and knew them all.

For her birthday, her parents got her a ticket to see the show. She sat in the very last seat in the farthest back right corner. There, she had a crazy dream.

She wanted to make her Broadway debut in Hamilton.

It wasn’t just the music that sparked her. It was also the choreography (by Andy Blankenbuehler). “There are moments,” she explains, “when the women aren’t in heels. They’re sliding on the ground. They’re gritty. They’re grounded. The women got to do more than just stand there and shake their hips and look pretty. They were dancing. That lit me up.”

Next Lexi did the two things Lexi always does when something lights her up: 1) Talk about it. 2) Keep her eyes wide open for ways to get closer to it.

When she saw a dance class at the Broadway Dance Center was being taught by Karla Garcia, a dancer in Hamilton, Lexi signed up.

Karla, Lexi says, changed her life. “She changed the way I danced, and she changed the trajectory of my career,” Lexi says.  Karla’s agent came to one of those classes to scout future clients and signed Lexi.

One of the first auditions her agent got for Lexi was for a show she’d dreamed of being in since college, a show very special to her and her grandmother: Finding Neverland.

She auditioned for Wendy.

But she didn’t get the job.

Then she got an audition for the Hamilton touring company.

But she didn’t get that job either.

Then she got a call.

The touring company for Finding Neverland wanted her in the ensemble instead, and to be a swing (i.e. understudy) for Peter.

While at the rehearsal center in Louisville, Kentucky learning the show, Lexi got another call she wasn’t expecting.

It was from her agent. “You’re coming home,” she said.

“I got fired,” Lexi interrupted, sure that’s what she meant.

“No,” her agent continued, “you’re coming home to make your Broadway debut in Hamilton.”

“Will they know what you overcame?”

The Hamilton touring company had kept her on file after her audition, and the woman who was playing the role of “Woman 2” in the ensemble was about to have a baby. They wanted Lexi to fill in while she was on maternity leave.

It was a dream come true. Lexi was elated and terrified.

Lexi says she felt like a “Hamilfan” who had secretly infiltrated the system, and she knew how much the show meant to people. Because she knew how much it meant to her. She wanted to do it justice. She wanted to do it perfectly.

That sometimes meant she was overdoing it.

Her intense desire to make sure people knew she was working hard and giving it her all could sometimes negate the purpose of storytelling, which, she learned from her fellow cast mates, was more about finding stillness.

Once, she got feedback from Andy Blankenbuehler himself, telling her that she was overdoing it sometimes, saying as kindly as possible, “You want to be genuine so bad that it’s anything but.”

Hearing feedback like that was her worst nightmare. But she took it seriously, because the last thing she ever wanted was to overact or overperform in a way that could be misunderstood as mocking.

It turns out, there was such a thing as trying too hard.

 “I was heartbroken and overwhelmed,” she says of how she felt when she first heard the feedback, “because I always said I don’t have the feet of a dancer, I don’t have the turnout of a dancer, but I have the heart of a dancer. It felt like, oh my gosh do I not even have that?”

But looking back, she says, she realized, “it’s not that I didn’t have that. It was just the next learning curve on my journey. Sure maybe that way of working was fine up until that point, but now I had reached the next level.”

Once she slept on it, she felt ready to implement it, telling herself, “Okay, focus. This is something that’s going to help you be a better performer and storyteller.”

She got help by watching and listening to the more seasoned actors around her. She especially remembers overhearing Nik Walker, who played Aaron Burr at the time, talking once about being still, breathing, holding the space and actually reacting to what was happening instead of projecting the “right” reaction.  Through being around the other artists who brought Hamilton to life, Lexi learned how to connect with her breath, the ground, and space she was in. Most of the time it was as simple as taking a single breath before reacting. “If I take a breath,” she says, “I realize those habitual reactions might not be what’s necessary, whether on stage or in real life.”

She’s also learned that sometimes the best reaction is no reaction at all. The key for her, she says, was to stop worrying about what everyone else was thinking about her and instead focus on receiving instead of reacting, giving instead of worrying.

Hamilton taught Lexi how to let go, how to breathe. And in doing that, she learned how to be in the moment she was actually in instead of stuck in her head worried if she was doing a good enough job.

Lexi realized working “too” hard actually isolated her from being able to connect with people from the stage. She learned instead to get comfortable with silence, with stillness, with being where she was, as she was.

While there isn’t any footage of Lexi in Hamilton, you can see the role she played, “Woman 2” as played by Hope Easterbrook, in the filmed version on Disney+. It’s easy to follow along because Hope is the only one with bright red hair. I watch it again to see where Lexi stood on stage and what choreography she performed.  I first see “Woman 2” about two minutes in, standing in the shadows beneath the rafters, and I think about Lexi there, waiting to make her Broadway debut.

Once Burr starts singing “Get your education/ Don’t forget from whence you came” I can see “Woman 2” begin to move, her arms go up to make a square missing it’s top, and then quickly drop down as Hamilton enters from her right. Then the ensemble sings together for the first time in the show, and I can imagine Lexi opening her mouth to sing alongside them: “Alex, you gotta fend for yourself.” A few minutes later the ensemble opens their mouths again to sing: “Will they know what you overcame?”

When the show ends, “Woman 2” along with everyone in the cast sings the final lines: “Who lives? Who dies? Who tells your story?”

Lexi remembers how her body vibrated as she waited in those rafters for the music to start when she made her Broadway debut. She remembers seeing her family in the audience for that first show. She remembers singing those last lines and then taking her first bow.

But what she remembers most of all is how throughout the show she kept looking at the very last seat in the very last row of the top right corner, remembering where she sat when she had this dream, remembering that she used to be there and now she’s here.

“That was a hard pill to swallow.”

Lexi performed Hamilton on Broadway until the other “Woman 2” came back from maternity leave. Then she went back to working her three jobs in the city and going on auditions.

Six months went by, and Lexi wasn’t booking anything.

“That was a hard pill to swallow,” she says, “because when you’re young, you think once you make it, you’ll just keep going from show to show.” A “Broadway bopper” she calls it. “And there are some of those people,” she says, “and it’s so fun to watch their careers unfold. But for some of us, there’s space in between.”

In that space, through a friend in Hamilton, Lexi met her now-husband Teddy, also a Broadway performer, and she became Lexi Toye.

Then, she got a call from her agent telling her the Hamilton team wanted her to be in the touring company.

She got that call in a coffee shop, and couldn’t wait to tell the kids she was teaching later that day. “I had a nasty gremlin in the back of my head,” she says of her time being billed as a teacher who had been in Hamilton, “saying, yes I’m teaching this to you, but I’m not the real deal.” But now she had more proof. “I walked into class that day with a bit of relief. Like, okay, they liked me. Maybe I didn’t do that bad of a job because I’m getting to go do this again. There was a stamp of validation, approval. Like, okay, I can do it.”

Lexi spent 6 months on tour, and once that contract ended it was back to the city and auditions and three jobs.

Then she got an audition for another one of her dream shows: Wicked.

She was sure nothing would come of that though.  She’d auditioned for Wicked twice before and didn’t get it. During the audition she asked a friend if she wanted to get brunch because she was sure she wouldn’t make it past the first round.

But this time, she did. Again and again they asked her to come back.

“And then,” Lexi says, “the pandemic happened.”

Broadway shut down.

New York shut down.

Everything shut down.

“What could our life look like?”

They were originally told the Broadway closures would just be for a few weeks, so Lexi and Teddy decided to take the time to be with their families in Florida.

“But two weeks,” Lexi says, “went on for much longer.”

While in Florida, Teddy, who was in Mean Girls on Broadway at the time, stepped away into another room to take a Zoom call with the cast and producers.

Tina Fey was a face in a little box, along with all the other cast and crew, and Teddy listened.

He walked out of Lexi’s parent’s guest room glazed, and said, “They’re closing the show.”

“So now,” Lexi explains, “we are two unemployed actors. And we don’t know when our industry is going to reopen.”

But instead of panicking, they decided to ask a question: “What could our life look like?”

They’d both grown up in Florida and always said they’d never come back, but they’d had such a wonderful time being so close to their families, and the thought of leaving felt kind of sad. What if they stayed? What if they tried something new?

Then Disney World slowly opened back up, with strict mask rules, stickers on concrete every six feet, and tall plastic partitions keeping people in lines apart. The in-park live entertainment wasn’t returning yet, but the park opening gave Lexi and Teddy hope. They both grew up loving the parks and were always impressed with the caliber of talent who put on the live shows every single day. What if that could be their next step?

It was just a thought. A little dream.

For the immediate future, they called their landlord in New York City to tell her the news about Mean Girls closing and she kindly let them out of their lease. Then they moved in with Lexi’s parents and got whatever jobs they could, Lexi as a teacher at her old dance studio, and Teddy at the quick service food location in Disney’s Art of Animation Resort.

Lexi was in awe of Teddy. She says she felt a lot of panic, but he was steadfast, always looking for how to keep doing what he loved. He hoped doing quick service would give him a way in and hoped to eventually work as a bartender at one of the story themed Disney locations, like Oga’s Cantina, where he could both use the bartending skills he gained in between Broadway jobs, and still be able to do a little of what he loved: acting.

He also had no shame about going from Broadway to working quick service food.  “I’m not above anything,” Lexi explains of what he would say, of his attitude.

Lexi leaned on Teddy a lot, because while she’d had that six-month draught, he’d had years of nothing before, so he knew how to do this, how to survive this. “He would coach me through it,” she says. “He’d say, ‘you’re not alone.’” It reminded her of what her brother used to say about her not being a snowflake. Teddy would remind her that this kind of artistic draught wasn’t new, that it was part of the artist journey, and that yes it’s important to strive for greatness and big dreams, but that it doesn’t define who you are. Not being where you want to be right now doesn’t mean you’re not enough.

Sometimes, he would say, that not having paying artistic work has nothing to do with you.  Sometimes, “it’s just the timing.” Or maybe “they needed someone tall. Or maybe they accidentally didn’t see you on the right because they were only looking left.”

That’s always a relief for a perfectionist to hear, and a good salve to the lie the perfectionist tells, that we are—or can be or should—be in control of everything; that if something goes wrong, it’s always our fault.

To believe the opposite is easier said than done, Lexi says, “but it helps to have the right people in your corner to remind you.”

After another year it was announced that Mickey’s Magical Friendship Faire, the castle stage show in Magic Kingdom, was going to return. Lexi felt a spark when she heard the news: she wanted to dance on that castle.

She cried when she first saw the costume: a form-fitting vest in soft unicorn-color hues, lined with gold cord atop a two-tiered gold tulle skirt and matching gold t-strap dancer shoes. She longed to be a part of this show. But it felt impossible. “How in the world would I get to do that?” she wondered. But like most of her big dreams, once she admitted them to herself, she couldn’t let it go. “I need to be one of those dancers,” she thought. Then she asked, “How can I be one of those dancers?”

Lexi still sometimes feels crippling self-doubt and imposter syndrome, and still works on fighting perfectionism and being more present every day, but no matter how loud those voices scream, she’s somehow managed to never let them stop her. “The desire,” she explains, “is greater than the fear. As powerful and loud and annoying as the fear is, the desire overrides it. The dream is just so exciting. So even though it’s like there are a thousand little me’s running around in my head on fire, screaming ‘you’re not enough, you don’t belong,’ there is that one golden me that’s like, ‘But we’ve gotta go for it.’”

“Did you see that?”

She went for it in the way she goes for everything: she opens her eyes and her mouth. During a commercial job she got in Florida, she told a fellow dancer about her dream to dance on the Disney castle one day. Another dancer at that job overheard and said, “you seem like you have high energy and that you really want it. Do you want me to give my boss your email?”

I ask her what motivates her to tell strangers her dreams. “Once the seed is planted,” she says, “I don’t shut up about it because you never know who you’re going to talk to. And then it’s like, something takes off.”

Four months later, Lexi was dancing on the Disney castle.

Just like in Hamilton, she looks out from the stage at the people in the audience whenever she can. What she sees are six-year-olds bouncing up and down next to 80-year-olds. “I will never forget,” she says, “there was this older gentleman with his wife in a wheelchair right in front of him, and during the ending bows, we locked eyes and I gave him the “I love you” sign with my hands. Then he sent it back to me and tapped his wife like, ‘Did you see that?’

 “If you don’t resist the pixie dust and everything,” she says, referring to the world Disney creates, “if you let it take you there, that magic, that escapism, is something that can help you get through this difficult life as a human.”

In addition to her work at Disney, Lexi also performed a workshop musical as part of the Orlando Fringe Festival called Whiskeyland, written by the very same Hamilton actor who helped her learn to be more present on stage: Nik Walker.

I sat in the front row, and seeing her then up close I would have never known she was someone who ever struggled to be present or grounded or that she was someone who once feared to sing. In that show she was, dare I say it, perfect.

I ask Lexi what all of these experiences do for her imposter syndrome. Do they ever quiet it? Is she ever able to feel what the people in the audience feel—the joy of her talent?

She says imposter syndrome will still try to convince her that she’s not really supposed to be there, that they meant to pick somebody else, that her being chosen was an accident. “But I think deep down,” she says, “I’m like, ‘No, there’s got to be something that worked because somehow I am here,’ which is wild.”

“As long as you’re giving it your all.”

A few months after I saw Lexi in Whiskeyland, I took one of the evening dance classes she teaches about once a month or so.

I hadn’t been to a dance class like this one in about 20 years.

When I got there, sitting on a bench in front of the classroom door waiting for the other class to let out before we could be let in, I started to panic. Everyone around me was clearly a professional dancer. What am I doing?

But then Lexi entered and greeted me with a wide smile and tight hug. “You’re so beautiful!” she gushed. She said something kind like that to everyone, I noticed, and her energy was as if she is always dancing on the inside.

She wore black leggings and a black t-shirt crop. Her hair was piled on top of her head in a messy bun and she was already sweaty from whatever class she had been teaching prior.

After the warm up, Lexi began to teach us a dance she choreographed to the song “Stayin’ Alive” by the Bee Gees, and tells us the story behind the dance: that we are skeletons letting loose and having fun.

Even though the choreography was advanced and complex, Lexi acted more like a Zumba instructor than a strict dance teacher, laughing and encouraging everyone along the way, telling them to ask her if they wanted to see a move again. That’s when I realized everyone there did dance for a job, and yet they were also doing dance for fun tonight just because they loved it.

I also noticed that the professional dancers weren’t perfect right away. They didn’t seem to expect themselves to be, either. Instead, they spoke up and asked questions at every turn. “How do you do this again?” “What comes after this?” “Can we do that again but slower?” “I’m getting stuck here can you help me?”

I relaxed. I danced (imperfectly). I had fun.

Later in the interview when I ask Lexi why she teaches these classes, she quotes a moment in the show “Ted Lasso” when the coach Roy takes the soccer captain to a park where kids are playing soccer. The coach says, as quoted by Lexi, “Remember, you once started this because you loved it.” She says once art or dance becomes a job, it can change that, and it’s important to come back to what you love and why you love it.

“We’re the luckiest people in the world,” Lexi says, “it does pay our bills and we get to do it for a living. But sometimes when it’s so monotonous, we’ve got to take ourselves out of it and wiggle in a different way to remind ourselves of who we were when we were six.”

That’s also part of her dance teacher philosophy. “I don’t care if you forget every ounce of choreography that I throw at you,” she explains, “as long as you’re giving it your all.”

Seeing Lexi teach I would have never guessed what I was going to learn days later, about her eating disorder, about her perfectionism. Because the dancer and teacher I see before me is fully in the moment, moving, breathing, and making space for others to do the same.

“Today when I approach my work and art,” she says, “and I start to feel the little-perfectionist-me kick in, I try to remind her that it isn’t about what everyone thinks (or if they deem my work ‘good enough’). When I’m distracted, it robs me of the moment. If I’m authentic in my humanness and imperfections, the audience will be able to connect with me no matter what story I’m telling.”

A few weeks after our interview, I go to Magic Kingdom by myself to see her dance on the castle. I stand near the front and bubbles float all around me from the bubble machines kids are joyously waving as they wait. There are crowds of people in the main castle hub stretched all the way towards main street to watch the show. The music swells and the show begins and I see Lexi come out in a unicorn-colored vest, tiered gold skirt, and gold t-strap shoes. Her knee touches her nose during one particularly high kick, and her skirt floats when she spins. The sun is bright but it’s surprisingly not hot. I smell just a hint of popcorn and funnel cake. I watch her dance as bubbles smack against my face and legs. I can tell she’s in the moment because she has the same look on her face she had when she taught the dance class, a look of someone who is seeing what is right in front of her, who isn’t afraid to give what’s right inside of her.

When Minnie comes out and turns to Anna and Elsa from Frozen and says in her high-pitched voice, “From the moment I heard your story, I admired you so much,” my eyes fill.

Then Elsa sings, “That perfect girl is gone/Here I stand, in the light of day.”

Before I go, Lexi gives me an “I love you sign” from the stage.