Since Mattel introduced us to their new physically diversified Barbies only a few days ago, I have found myself slowly sinking back into the insecurities I had only recently escaped. With new “Tall,” “Petite” and “Curvy” dolls, I am left worrying which category I would have fallen into as a little girl.

I loved Barbies. I would spend whole days in my room mentally crafting an entire world for my Barbies to exist in. I would clear off my shelves to make them into apartment complexes or lace a pink and purple plastic town around my bedroom, praying nobody knocked any of it over when tucking me in at night. Most of the time, I would leave my Barbie games set up for days, dedicating entire weekends to Velcro dresses and fuchsia convertibles.

My friends and I would haul our favorite Barbies and their accessories from house to house and ‘play Barbies’ for hours. Sometimes, the day would end in a sleepover simply because we were right in the middle of our game. Someone’s Barbie had just gotten engaged or their fashion show hadn’t happened yet or, more often than not, we had spent so much time setting it all up and deciding what our Barbies’ names would be that we hadn’t even started playing by nightfall.

However, we never once thought our Barbies were supposed to look like us. Our American Girl dolls looked a little bit like us, but that was their whole mission. They had a doll specifically called the “Just Like Me” doll. But Barbies are Barbies. They are blonde and blue eyed and they have perfect makeup and perky breasts and long, slender legs. Barbie never tried to look like us, and we didn’t want her to.

We wanted our Barbies to be animal rescuers or secret princesses or capable moms whose husbands work a lot (because our proportion of Ken dolls to Barbies was always a wee bit uneven), but we never thought they should have freckles or blue hair or bigger rear ends.

Not one of my friends seemed to mind Barbie’s lack of resemblance to them. My friend Coleen, with her red hair and slender frame, never cared about Barbie’s bust size. My friend Kyra, whose thick, near-black hair reached her butt, never mentioned Barbie’s blondness.

In fact, I even remember one day when Coleen and I had recently gotten “Barbie Fashionista” dolls. Those were the best ones because their hands and legs bent easily, and we found ourselves laughing at how unrealistically small Barbie’s legs and knees were becoming with each new doll. As a group of tweens, we unanimously agreed it was absurd, but never took it to mean our knees should be the same width as our elbows.

So, why Mattel thought that emphasizing physical appearances was the right way to empower girls, I don’t know, but now I am wondering if I would have been the curvy Barbie. Her larger feet would have matched mine. I could have pretended she loves M&Ms as passionately as I do.

When I read about Time magazine’s Eliana Dockerman visiting Mattel’s headquarters and trying, to no avail, to stuff the new “Curvy” doll into a cute, original Barbie-sized dress, I flashed back to myself in a dimly lit dressing room trying to wiggle into an unforgiving Anthropologie dress about a month ago. “Her plump bottom gets stuck in the same spot,” Dockerman sadly conceded after trying to wedge the dress on her new Barbie a few different ways. Same, Barbie. Same.

But I don’t want my dear Barbie to have to worry about dress sizes and smoothing herself out with Spanx. I want Barbie to confidently walk her dog in heels and some outrageously glamorous outfit and live in a pastel colored mansion.

Next, are we going to abandon that stuff — the unrealistic houses and clothes and cars — in order to make her more representative of every socioeconomic situation? Wouldn’t that take all the fun away? Playing with dolls is playing pretend. It’s living out dreams and creating them all at the same time.

In real, grown-up life, we probably won’t drive pink cars and get to live in a fantastic “Dream House,” but at least we can when we’re children. And we won’t ever have a size negative two body like Barbie’s but at least we can put her in strapless gowns and not worry about how toned her arms are, because we’ll have to worry about that plenty when we’re in high school.

The beautiful thing about Barbie is, regardless of who I am, my Barbie could be anything. She could be any age, any profession, any personality. I didn’t need one with less makeup to feel like I didn’t need makeup. I didn’t wear makeup because my mom said I was beautiful without it. I didn’t need a Barbie with big feet to feel OK about my size 10 shoes. My dad always told me that I had pretty and proportional feet.

Besides, no one’s feet look like Barbie’s and no one’s body looks like Barbie’s. She’s a doll. So, let’s let Barbie be a doll and stop allowing our desperation for political correctness dictate the dimensions of a piece of plastic.