Walking on Knives: The Depth Psychology of The Little Mermaid (A Queer Telling)

Most of us met The Little Mermaid through Disney: the red-haired Ariel, the catchy songs, the glittering wedding at the end. In that version, she gives up her voice but still gets the prince, the castle, and her father’s blessing. Psychologically, it’s comforting: you can silence yourself for love, reshape your entire being around someone else, and somehow it will all work out. Your sacrifice will be rewarded with belonging.

Hans Christian Andersen’s version is less comforting. His mermaid has no name. When she trades her tongue and her voice for legs, every step feels like walking on knives. She saves the prince’s life, walks beside him in silence, and dances for him while her feet bleed inside her shoes. He is fond of her; he enjoys her presence. But he never fully chooses her. He marries someone else. Her enormous sacrifice does not secure the love she imagined.

This is the pattern of a person who gives up the deepest part of themselves for a relationship that never fully arrives. The tale refuses to let the cost remain abstract. The pain is in her body. With every step she bleeds, as she keeps offering grace to someone who will never fully claim her.

What breaks the heart most about this mermaid is that she doesn’t understand how incredibly valuable she is. She believes the relationship is the treasure and her voice is the price, so she hands it over without hesitation. The one who fully grasps the worth of her voice is the sea witch. The witch knows that the song, the speech, the living force of the mermaid’s inner world is the true currency. And the mermaid trades away the core of who she is for a chance at being chosen, while the witch smiles because she has just acquired the most powerful thing in the room.

This is exactly what happens in so many real lives. Often, a woman doesn’t yet understand that her voice is the treasure. She believes the relationship is what matters most, and her voice, her vision, her perspective, are simply what she thinks has to be given away to keep it all going. The sea witch sees the value of what the mermaid carries long before the mermaid does.

In my story, the sea witch and the prince were the same person. The one who drew me in as a lover and offered the fantasy of previously denied heteronormative validation was first someone who recognized my voice as currency and extracted and exploited it as free labor. She didn’t truly listen or even read everything I sent her, but she read enough to see that my writing, my voice, were useful to her.

And I gave it away for free. First my labor was taken, then my money, then my signature was misused, and finally there was a repeated push to bind my tongue so I could never tell the whole story.

The archetypal echo is almost eerie: the sea witch who understands the power of the mermaid’s voice before the mermaid does; the turning of living speech into currency; and, eventually, the repeated demand that the one who has already sacrificed everything also agree never to speak the full truth.

For a long time, my outrage focused on what was easiest to prove: the money. This was concrete harm—bank accounts, documents, numbers, and signatures used in ways I never consented to. They matter, and they will always matter. But what took me longer to realize is that my voice is worth more.

This story is a tragedy, but it is also an initiation. In the end, the little mermaid is given a knife and told she can save herself or kill the prince. Instead, she throws the knife into the sea and dissolves into foam, beginning a different kind of spiritual existence. She steps away from the demand that she either destroy herself or another, and she claims her own agency, symbolically refusing, as I did, the documents of silence. I, like the little mermaid, refused—rejecting the demand to only exist within someone else’s story as they choose to craft it.

The happy ending I am interested in now is not the Disney wedding. It looks like this: I keep my voice, I keep my soul, and I walk in a life where my feet are not walking on knives. I choose relationships, communities, and collaborations that welcome my talent and my wholeness together—not extracting when that is convenient and otherwise keeping my and my children’s existence in the closet. Now I know that my voice is worth more than anything else that was sacrificed or stolen. It is my deepest, and most profound, inheritance