I had an experience on Friday that taught me a little bit about myself. I went to Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge at Disneyland for the first time and the experience was so much more than I imagined it was going to be.

I’m a Star Wars fan; a massive one. I grew up on the movies and playing Princess Leia in every game of pretend in the back yard. I’ve had many involved conversations about kyber crystals and why Mace Windu’s lightsaber is purple. I wept bitter, loud tears the morning I heard Carrie Fisher passed away. My license plate is even an obscure Star Wars quote. It was no secret to me that I’m a true blue fan but I was not ready for the long-buried childhood dream of going on a Star Wars adventure to surface as profoundly as it did on Friday.

I don’t loudly broadcast my Star Wars love for the very sad, societally conditioned reason that I am a girl and if you are a female Star Wars fan (a girl claiming any “geeky” fandom really…) you all of a sudden go on trial with the geeky males around you. They, for some reason I still don’t understand, believe you like what you like. It’s assumed you’re just trying to fit in or flirt with the immediate nerd-boy population and nothing else. That is slowly changing but sexism is still wildly alive and largely unchecked in the Nerdy Realms.

I took (and still take) serious offense to having to prove my love for something I truly treasure. It diminishes it to me so I tend to defensively not disclose my full love of Star Wars to the male geek world.

Reason number two is many early childhood flubs with other girls that I found out liked Star Wars. There was always slightly horrified looks sent my way after I verbally vomited my pent up childhood devotion to Star Wars all over them. “YOULIKESTARWARSTOO???ILOVETHEM!WHATDOYOULOVETHEMOST?ME-ITSALLABOUTBRINGINGBALANCEBACKANDBEINGTRUETOYOURSELFEVENIFITHURTSESPECIALLYIFITHURTS.ITSUPERHURTDARTHVADERBUTHEDIDIT.ITWASLOVE.ANDTHEFORCEBUTTHEFORCEREALLJUSTISLOVEIFYOUTHINKABOUTIT.”

……

So I learned not to engage girls with Star Wars either, not right off the bat anyway. I eventually learned to reign it in a bit but when you’re 8 and the world still has a sense of emotional clarity it’s easy to get a bit unhinged and swing your Star Wars love around like a toddler with a lightsaber. I was an unbridled Rebel Pilot with no X-wing to vent my sense of justice regarding the universe.

So I got older and went to college and read a lot more books and went on a few other kind of adventures and my Star Wars love downshifted to a background setting for my adult brain and a conversation piece if the subject came up. No biggie, right? We’ve all grown up and have to give our best attention to things like doing taxes and planning retirements and not getting diabetes.

However, in places of wonder like Disneyland, where whimsy still has a home I’m reminded for a few hours at a time that there are other things that give life meaning too.

On my Batuu day I was going to meet my friends who were already in the park and in line for Smuggler’s Run, so my first steps into Batuu were all by myself and the second I went under the bridge that led to the land I started to feel the bubbling up of my long-forgotten childish yearnings of wanting to be a part of a Star Wars adventure. There was a good 7 minutes of wandering around a Star Wars city and turning corner after corner and finding more wonder. Then, when I turned the last corner of the cantina and saw a life-size Millennium Falcon – I lost it. Every wish I ever had to hop on the Millennium Falcon and go help save the good things in this world came bubbling up, barreling though my subconscious, and manifested in disbelieving, happy tears.

Yes, a spaceship made me cry.

A fake one.

One that has never been to space. I get that.

But Star Wars has a perfect grammar of symbols and the Falcon is one of my favorites. To me, it represents hope. The Falcon always makes the impossible fall within reach. As long as it’s around, there’s a chance, no matter the odds, and I LOVE that. We need the Millennium Falcon more right now than ever before methinks.

I spent an incredible half-day taking it all in and my friends and I did really well on Smuggler’s Run. I was a very capable gunner, thank you very much.

I feel like my visit to Batuu was my first true experience that Disneyland strives to give everyone; that of feeling the wonder of being able to enter and be a part of one of your favorite stories. For most girls going to Fantasyland and meeting the princesses usually does it and for me, that was all well and good but it’s never turned me into a big-eyed, wandering, gap-mouthed, elated, barely-contained joy of a human like Batuu did for me at 40 years old.

On the drive home I turned off my audiobook and got in my head about why it was so much more of a powerful experience than I was expecting it to be. I like to think that I’m pretty good at gauging this stuff by this point in life but the magnitude of this this truly caught me off guard. I was expecting wonder, but not unbridled joy. That doesn’t come around too often anymore.

As a girl I read my fair share of fairytales and loved them all right but I think that growing up just a few blocks from the Huntington Library provided me ample opportunities to wander around real-live palaces and stroll up and down real winding staircases and out into real rose gardens and through real forests that none of that felt like it was limited to my books or movies. It was a part of my life too. I also grew up blocks from CalTech and if I needed to live out any Beast’s library fantasies, I could head over to the library there or at the Huntington. I was a very spoiled with the spaces my childhood imagination had to run rampant.

What I wanted though, more than palaces and balls was adventure. I love, and still adore, the idea of space adventures and inter-planet politics. That was not something the Huntington could bring to life for me. The science wing is amazing but it’s a little short on Ewoks and lightsabers.

So I learned that yes, this little girl is still waiting for her space adventure and to defend justice, mercy, balance, and love in a universe that so easily gets lopsided and puppeteered by the influence of the Dark Side of the Force and she now has a playground just down the freeway in which that can all happen.

May the Force be with you. Now and always.