I didn’t really fit into the world I was born into. Everything that came so naturally to my older sisters seemed impossible for me, the quiet one who always came across as a fish out of water.

Most of girlhood was spent wishing to be part of another world — a world where my body felt less awkward, where what I liked wasn’t considered weird, where people weren’t so overwhelming, where I didn’t always say and do the wrong thing, where adventures made me brave.

I found that world, but only in an underwater kingdom I created from my own imagination whenever I swam to the bottom of the ocean.

As a kid growing up in Brazil, I’d wrap my legs together tightly before diving under, so the shadow cast on the sandy rocks below gave me a finned tail. After transforming into a mermaid, I stopped being the shy girl with an ill-fitting body and personality. I became a force of nature, braving the boundless unknowns of the open water, flipping through forests of seaweed with only stray fish for company.

It’s no wonder why my Disney princess was and always will be Ariel.

Like me, she was the youngest of King Triton’s perfect princess daughters, the oddball problem child who wasn’t winning any popularity contests. She was even as voiceless as me, though her inability to speak was a sea witch’s curse instead of a spell cast by crippling social anxiety. The classic Little Mermaid song ‘Part of your world’ is, after all, an anthem for all those with an overwhelming need to belong.

Decades later, I see now how pretending to be Ariel gave me permission to want something more — a magical place where a fish out of water is loved, seen, understood. But on The Little Mermaid’s 30th anniversary, with the hindsight of today’s social progress, it’s embarrassing to admit just how much our Disney princesses meant to us as girls.

We’re grown-ass women in 2019. It’s silly if not downright socially irresponsible to lose ourselves to the princess fantasies we now recognize as problematic. I mean, how do I reconcile feminist beliefs with idolizing a protagonist who gives up her voice, family, species, and agency to marry some hot guy she saw once?

Yet when Disney offered to teach me how to swim like Ariel at a Santa Monica hotel pool, I forgot all about outgrowing girlish dreams. And floating in a blue-and-green sequined tail and seashell top, I tried to reconcile with the conflict at the heart of wanting to be my problematic fav. 

I won’t lie: The reality of becoming an IRL mermaid is less idyllic than the fantasy. Mermaiding is tough work, despite appearances.

Following a makeup session (with lots of “sealing” to ensure I didn’t become Ursula the Sea Witch), I was wrestled into my fin. Trying to maneuver with it on land was an immersive experience, to say the least. I was awkwardly wheeled in a cart to the heated pool like a beached whale.

Once in the water though, I was instantaneously transported back to the underwater kingdom of my childhood. The chill of Los Angeles’ atypically frigid weather last week melted away as that familiar sense of belonging warmed me all over.

My finstructor Virginia first advised me on the basic mermaid stroke: the dolphin kick, an athletic yet delicate move that requires a simultaneously fluid and controlled motion. Mermaids are serene, Virginia reminded me, their poses languid and playful.

There was the unfortunate hurdle of breath, though. Mermaids don’t need air, but I had to release all oxygen before my body could even sink low enough. My tail, while obviously superior to the plain, old human legs I used as a kid, acted at times like an unhelpful flotation device.

In truth, though, the small annoyances were nothing compared to the sensation of unfettered freedom as I swam, body weightless and powerful all at once.

Where I was born in Bahia, Brazil, the ocean is inextricably linked to womanly power. In the pantheon of Afro-Brazilian gods (or orixhas), the sea goddess Iemanjá reigns over all like Zeus reigns over the Greeks. On New Year’s Eve, Brazilians honor her by wearing white and leaving offerings on the beach like flowers, mirrors, candles, and seashells.

In myths about women of the sea, their femininity becomes a force of nature to be reckoned with. Iemanjá’s waves give life, as much as they take it away. Mermaids (or sirens) in other cultures are seductive ideals of femininity — luring sailors to their deaths. The story of The Little Mermaid might be a patriarchal, Disney-fied adaptation of these legends, but the pull of that particular empowerment fantasy is far more ancient.

Throughout my all-too-brief hour of mermaid metamorphosis, I realized something. I’m a 26-year-old woman still playing pretend in an imaginary kingdom with imaginary fish friends. And I’m proud that I’ll never outgrow the dream of being Ariel.

In the past (and still even now), girls have had no choice but to subsist on media made for them by men unwittingly pedaling idealized male conceits of our fantasies. Part of me continues to feel cheated by that. But a bigger part of me rejects the notion that we should feel any shame over the icons who defined our girlhood.

Despite how disempowering fairytale princesses can often be, many of us made their stories our own. From within the confines of male-created girlhood media, we carved out spaces for our actual wants, desires, and power fantasies.

As a whole, Ariel’s story didn’t age very well. But the reasons why we idolized her are more timeless than any of that.

What draws little girls to Disney princesses usually has very little to do with the handsome prince at the end. The sheer popularity of Frozen’s Elsa and Anna prove that, especially when contrasted with how those same super fans couldn’t care less about Kristoff.

My desire to be Ariel was almost in spite of her cardboard cutout of a prince whose name I can’t even remember. The real fantasy was being part of a world where I was free of the pressures every girl faces growing up in a patriarchal society. 

At mermaid school, gliding weightlessly through the water, I allowed myself to return to that magical place that once felt so potent.

My mom used to call me peixinha, her little fish. Because while my older princess-perfect sisters would tan on the sand, she would watch me dive nonstop for hours upon hours, a golden head in the waves occasionally resurfacing for air before diving right back under.

My grandma claimed that at three years old, I nearly gave her a heart attack when she took her eyes off me for a single second by a pool once, and heard a splash. I’d jumped in and, legend has it, was already doggy paddling into the deep end before she could even reach me.

On land, I was never very good at being the little girl I was supposed to be: obedient, gracious, and charming (despite my best interest). So I made my own world instead, where I reigned as a different kind of princess: wild and fearless and unfettered.

In my underwater kingdom, I didn’t have to listen to the voices in my head telling me how I was supposed to act. At the bottom of the ocean, all the overwhelming noise from the surface world above went quiet, and I could finally hear my own voice.

Big and empty, the seabed became a canvas on which I could paint the universe that had been living inside me but was impossible to articulate at home. I began to accept who I was and what I wanted when no one else was around.

We will always need to look back at the formative stories of girlhood and imagine a better world. But in our haste to usher in this progress, we’ve inadvertently developed a belittling disdain for the Disney princesses we loved — rejecting what they meant to us instead of just what they tell us about what’s wrong with society.

But loving those princess fantasies doesn’t make you a bad feminist. Especially since, for better or and worse, those same princesses helped shape us into the women we are now.

Today’s Disney princesses are like Black Panther’s Shuri, technological super-genius warriors. The girls who will build themselves on those princess narratives can grow into unimaginably powerful women. But that doesn’t invalidate the princesses who came before them, and the women who grew up with them only to realize that we all deserved better.

There’s no shame in dreaming along with Ariel to be part of their world. But what's more powerful is showing others what it’s like to be part of ours. 

You can catch the The Little Mermaid on Walt Disney Signature Collection Digital and Blu-ray, out Feb. 26, 2019.