How I became part of Ariel’s world for the 30th anniversary of ‘Little Mermaid’

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. 

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