WASHINGTON — When she was younger, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said she acted like a “white dude” to get ahead.

“Like straight up. You think you need to talk a certain way, dress a certain way, have your shoulder pads out to here, be like, ‘Hi Jan!’” she said, deepening her voice in a podcast interview. “You think that’s how you have to move through the world and I found myself subconsciously doing that in high school and in college.”

“I felt like I need to write a certain way and talk a certain way,” she went on. “And like the things they like, and play golf.”

Ocasio-Cortez was making the point that when she was growing up in the 1990s and 2000s, “I didn’t see any women like me in positions of leadership.”

“And so when you’re only seeing white dudes running the world you think you need to act like a white dude to run the world,” the New York Democrat said.

Ocasio-Cortez was being interviewed by “Girls Who Code” founder Reshma Saujani for her podcast “Brave Not Perfect.” The congresswoman taped the interview over the weekend in front of an audience of young girls at the New York Hall of Science in Queens.

She told her listeners that the problem with acting like someone you’re not was that “that mold wasn’t made for you.”

“And even if you try the hardest at being that, you will not be as good as someone who is that already,” she pointed out. “That’s why I’ve tried really hard to authentically be myself while I’m here in this moment and in this position, because I want to show other people that there are other ways of being powerful in the world.”

She encouraged the girls in the audience to not fear failure.

“The worst thing that could happen to me is I’m a one-term congresswoman, is that I don’t get re-elected or I get gerrymandered out of my district of whatever it is,” she said. “We joke that we’re just going to move upstate and build a yurt and live off the land. So that’s my worse-case scenario.”

And she also recalled a time when she failed out of fear.

Before running for Congress, Ocasio-Cortez flirted with the idea of becoming a children’s book author.

“One of the things that I was thinking about doing is doing children’s books that reflect our community and that was one of my first projects,” she recalled. “I wanted to work on children’s books where young girls of color were the protagonist and it wasn’t just a book on, you know …”

“Sweet Valley High?” Saujani offered..

Ocasio-Cortez agreed.

“I wanted it to just be this epic story and the protagonist was us. And it was in our home and in our environment,” she explained.

She said the plan didn’t work out because of her “perfectionism.”

“It’s not perfect, it’s the worst — and I would stop trying,” she recalled.