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Britney Spears is in charge of her own life and is now telling her story.
Sixteen years after infamously shaving her head, attacking paparazzi with an umbrella and acting out, she’s now explaining her reasoning behind that.
People magazine exclusively obtained an excerpt from Spears’ upcoming memoir “The Woman in Me,” and she isn’t holding back.
“I’d been eyeballed so much growing up, I’d been looked up and down, had people telling me what they thought of my body, since I was a teenager. Shaving my head and acting out were my ways of pushing back,” she wrote.
When her family placed her in a conservatorship, she was made to understand “those days were over now.”
“I had to grow my hair out and get back into shape. I had to go to bed early and take whatever medication they told me to take,” she said.
The conservatorship was put in place in 2008 with her father, Jamie, being mostly in charge of the day-to-day power over his daughter’s choices. Many felt the arrangement was to help her, but she said did not.
“I became a robot. But not just a robot — a sort of child-robot. I had been so infantilized that I was losing pieces of what made me feel like myself,” she wrote. “The conservatorship stripped me of my womanhood, made me into a child. I became more of an entity than a person onstage. I had always felt music in my bones and my blood; they stole that from me.
“This is what’s hard to explain, how quickly I could vacillate between being a little girl and being a teenager and being a woman, because of the way they had robbed me of my freedom. There was no way to behave like an adult, since they wouldn’t treat me like an adult, so I would regress and act like a little girl; but then my adult self would step back in — only my world didn’t allow me to be an adult,” she said in the memoir.
“The woman in me was pushed down for a long time. They wanted me to be wild onstage, the way they told me to be, and to be a robot the rest of the time,” she wrote. “I felt like I was being deprived of those good secrets of life — those fundamental supposed sins of indulgence and adventure that make us human. They wanted to take away that specialness and keep everything as rote as possible. It was death to my creativity as an artist.”
The “Baby One More Time” singer also explained that while the public scrutinized her appearance, so did her dad.
“If I thought getting criticized about my body in the press was bad, it hurt even more from my own father. He repeatedly told me I looked fat and that I was going to have to do something about it.
“Feeling like you’re never good enough is a soul-crushing state of being for a child. He’d drummed that message into me as a girl, and even after I’d accomplished so much, he was continuing to do that to me.”
In November of 2021, a Los Angeles judge freed Spears from her conservatorship.
“The Woman in Me” hits shelves on Oct. 24.
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