As a kid, I liked Britney more than I cared to admit. After “…Baby One More Time” debuted in 1998, I often styled my hair exactly like hers in the music video—two high teenybopper ponytails flanking my face. At the same time, I enthusiastically disparaged her. I was such a little bitch at twelve years old. Was I jealous? Did her good-girl image offend me?

More likely, I was just parroting what I saw—highly inappropriate opinions and accusations concerning a teenage girl, barely five years older than me, endlessly plastered in plain view across magazine covers and tabloid front-pages. Lest we forget how much more pervasive and invasive print media was then compared to today.

“…Baby One More Time” music video still, 1998

Prior to the complicated glories of internetization and smartphones, consumers lacked the luxury of digital personalized feeds and results. Instead, everything—the good, the bad, and the ugly, which could be very, very ugly—was on display for everyone, regardless of age, gender, or interest. Print media also took up a ton of space; it was impossible to miss, impossible for my spongy teenage eyes to soak up.

It wasn’t until “Toxic” came out in 2003 that my wall of resistance finally crumbled. Reluctantly, I admitted to myself and the world at large that yes, I was in fact a fan of the Princess of Pop. It was that damn 80’s Bollywood sample that got me—"Tere Mere Beech Mein". And after the glowy, beautiful, futuristic Blade Runneresque music video companion aired, well I was Britney’s for life after that.

I finally got around to reading The Woman In Me, Britney’s tell-all memoir following the termination of her father’s profiteering 13-year conservatorship over her. I gave it a charitable 3 out of 5 on Goodreads. This felt generous on my part, as the book as a book, deserved a 1 out of 5 for its erratic and rudimentary writing. But her story as a survivor—exploited, abused, censored, controlled, and traumatized by her family—is an important one, and I didn’t have the heart to drive down the book’s overall score by too much.

As simplistic as The Woman In Me might be, the words had to come from Britney alone, whose voice was suppressed and denied until the very end of her conservatorship. Think what you will about her bizarre Instagram content, but before 2020, her body language and wardrobe were her only means of non-managed communication with the outside world. That’s so fucked. Anyway, I’m happy Britney had and seized the opportunity to communicate her living hell in her own words. It’s a brutal tale worth sharing.

Leading up to her conservatorship, Britney shaved her head in February 2007. Later that year, in October, she released “Blackout”, my personal favorite album of hers. Both events were significant acts of expression few understood at the time. I won’t say I understood them exactly, but at the time I related to her, how she presented—her overt rage, defiance, and self-destruction.

I shaved my own head the following summer, the year she was involuntarily placed under conservatorship. Not because Britney did it; I definitely did not have her in mind as a friend ran an electric razor through my hair. But the timing says otherwise. Of course Britney had something to do with it, just as she did my “…Baby One More Time” ponytails nearly a decade earlier.

All of us are entitled to evolve, to be embarrassing risk-seeking trainwrecks at points in our lives. It’s how we understand the consequences and learn. It's how we process our emotions in order to grow. In her memoir, Britney repeatedly mentions feeling like a little girl and reverting to a child. And it's no wonder—we can only be denied change and personhood for so long.

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