The Woman in Me

by Britney Spears

Artists make things and play characters because they want an escape into faraway worlds,

I wanted to hide, but I also wanted to be seen. Both things could be true.

It’s funny how one split second can change a family’s dynamics forever.

The saddest part to me was that what I always wanted was a dad who would love me as I was—somebody

Isn’t that awful? He was the one who was drunk. He was the one whose alcoholism had made us so poor. He was the one passed out in the chair. But she was the one who ended up pissing me off the most,

The way social anxiety works is that what feels like a totally normal conversation to most people, to you feels mortifying.

It was hard for anyone to imagine that someone who could perform for thousands at a time could, backstage with just one or two people, be gripped by panic. Anxiety is strange that way.

I feel like a lot of women—and this is definitely true of me—can be as strong as they want to be, can play this powerful role, but at the end of the day, after we’ve done our work and made our money and taken care of everyone else, we want someone to hold us tight and tell us everything’s going to be okay.

I deserve to have the same rights as anybody does, by having a child, a family, any of those things, and more so. And that’s all I wanted to say to you.

This is the human experience and to take that away was so upsetting