The Woman in Me

by Britney Spears

As a little girl I walked for hours alone in the silent woods behind my house in Louisiana, singing songs. Being outside gave me a sense of aliveness and danger.

A girl from Pennsylvania named Christina Aguilera and I were told we hadn’t made the cut but that we were talented.

I had tried to go back to being an ordinary teenager, but it hadn’t worked. I still wanted something more.

Making that video was the most fun part of doing that first album. That’s probably the moment in my life when I had the most passion for music. I was unknown, and I had nothing to lose if I messed up. There is so much freedom in being anonymous. I could look out at a crowd who’d never seen me before and think, You don’t know who I am yet. It was kind of liberating that I didn’t really have to care if I made mistakes.

I was sixteen when, on October 23, 1998, the “… Baby One More Time” single hit stores. The next month the video premiered, and suddenly I was getting recognized everywhere I went.

I realized how powerful it can be when women defy expectations.

I signed my name with a heart.

Meanwhile, I started to notice more and more older men in the audience, and sometimes it would freak me out to see them leering at me like I was some kind of Lolita fantasy for them, especially when no one could seem to think of me as both sexy and capable, or talented and hot. If I was sexy, they seemed to think I must be stupid. If I was hot, I couldn’t possibly be talented.

I wish back then I’d known the Dolly Parton joke: “I’m not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I’m not dumb. And I also know that I’m not blonde.” My real hair color is black.

When I think back on that time, I was truly living the dream, living my dream.

At night my dancers—there were eight of them, two girls, the rest guys—and I went skinny-dipping in the ocean, singing and dancing and laughing with each other. We talked for hours under the moon. It was so beautiful.

still can’t believe that Justin was going to wear denim and I said, “We should match! Let’s do denim-on-denim!”

Yes, as a teenager I played into that portrayal, because everyone was making such a big deal out of it. But if you think about it, it was pretty stupid for people to describe my body in that way, for them to point to me and say, “Look! A virgin!” It’s nobody’s business at all.

I can feel the energy of other people. I can’t help but take it in.

The poet Rumi says the wound is the place where the light enters you.

You have to speak the thing that you’re feeling, even if it scares you. You have to tell your story. You have to raise your voice.

It would have been a dream apartment to use as a home base to explore the city, but I hardly ever left the place. One of the only times I did, a man behind me on an elevator said something that made me laugh; I turned around and it was Robin Williams.

In fact, my family was so against the wedding that I started to think maybe I’d accidentally committed a brilliant act. Because I realized: something about my being under their control and not having a stronger connection to someone else had become very, very important to them.

What do I have over you guys? I wondered. Why would someone else be so huge a threat? Perhaps it’s worth mentioning that, by this point, I was supporting them financially.

And so that night I gave them some material. I went into a hair salon, and I took the clippers, and I shaved off all my hair. Everyone thought it was hilarious. Look how crazy she is! Even my parents acted embarrassed by me. But nobody seemed to understand that I was simply out of my mind with grief. My children had been taken away from me. With my head shaved, everyone was scared of me, even my mom. No one would talk to me anymore because I was too ugly.

Shaving my head was a way of saying to the world: Fuck you. You want me to be pretty for you? Fuck you. You want me to be good for you? Fuck you. You want me to be your dream girl? Fuck you.

Now my husband, Hesam, tells me that it’s a whole thing for beautiful girls to shave their heads. It’s a vibe, he says—a choice not to play into ideas of conventional beauty. He tries to make me feel better about it, because he feels bad about how much it still pains me.

It just proved that the world only cares about your physical appearance, even if you are suffering and at your lowest point.

The only problem with this plan: I was not fine.

Right around the holidays, I found out about my sixteen-year-old sister’s pregnancy from an exclusive in the tabloids. The family had kept it from me.

As parents we’re always telling our children, “Stay safe. Don’t do this; don’t do that.” But even though safety is the most important thing, I also think it’s important to have awakenings and challenge ourselves to feel liberated, to be fearless and experience everything the world has to offer.

I’d later come to believe something had changed that month, since the last time I was brought to the hospital for evaluation. My father had struck up a very close friendship with Louise “Lou” Taylor, who he worshipped. She was front and center during the implementation of the conservatorship that would later allow them to control and take over my career.

Later, I learned that at the time they put me into the conservatorship, on the heels of his bankruptcy, my dad had been financially indebted to Lou, owing her at least $40,000, a lot for him, especially back then. That is what my new lawyer Mathew Rosengart later called a “conflict of interest” in court.

The conservatorship was created supposedly because I was incapable of doing anything at all—feeding myself, spending my own money, being a mother, anything. So why was it that a few weeks later, they had me shoot an episode of How I Met Your Mother and then sent me on a grueling world tour?

“I just want to let you know,” he said, “I call the shots. You sit right there in that chair and I’ll tell you what goes on.” I looked at him with a growing sense of horror. “I’m Britney Spears now,” he said.

would go to sleep early. And then I would wake up and do what they told me again. And again. And again. It was like Groundhog Day. I did that for thirteen years.

I sometimes thought that it was almost funny how I won those awards for the album I made while I was supposedly so incapacitated that I had to be controlled by my family. The truth was, though, when I stopped to think about it for very long, it wasn’t funny at all.

The woman in me was pushed down for a long time.

But it was as if I had forgotten that I was a powerful woman.

Looking up at her from my knees on the dance studio floor, I thought, Wait a minute. Why are the people who are charged—by the state—with my care not half as interested in my well-being as I am in this little girl’s?

“What if I don’t go?” I asked. My father said that if I didn’t go, then I’d have to go to court, and I’d be embarrassed. He said, “We will make you look like a fucking idiot, and trust me, you will not win. It’s better me telling you to go versus a judge in court telling you.”

This sense, deeply felt and profound, that the woman in me was still strong enough to fight for what was right.

It’s been a while since I felt truly present in my own life, in my own power, in my womanhood. But I’m here now.