Hyperfixation Friday: Britney

what we're all fixated on, tbh

I’m about halfway through Britney Spears’ memoir, and it’s incredibly powerful. It’s a difficult read, no question, and I have nothing but respect and empathy for her.

I grew up with Britney Spears. She is two months younger than me, and her career exploded when I was a senior in high school. I found myself nodding at all the cultural flashpoints she references in the book. I was there, but not there, at the same time. I didn’t experience these past twenty five years as a famous person. And all I can say is THANK GOD for that.

I, too, thought Britney was “crazy” at one point. I never thought that took anything away from her undeniable talent, her beauty or her intrigue, but I definitely bought the “she might not be able to function on her own” narrative at first. I lived with a person who attempted suicide and struggled with addiction, so I believed her father when she said he did this to save her life. In 2008, I certainly hadn’t come to terms with my relationship with my own parents. I hadn’t come to terms with my own trauma and mental health struggles. I was functional! I didn’t shave my head randomly and party with celebrities! Sure, she had more money than god and success I couldn’t imagine in a million years, but I wasn’t THAT crazy. Thank god, right?

Thank god I’m not like THAT.

We watched our culture build up the party girls - the Parises, the Britneys, the Lindsays - and we all grabbed our collective popcorn and watched society tear them down, brick by brick. Women like me didn’t have enough self-awareness of how our complicity might affect how the world sees us - the elder millennials now in their late 30s/early 40s. The women with Boomer parents who spent years starving ourselves to fit into those low rise jeans. Many of us are fiercely independent. We were handed a house key and told to be back when the street lights came back on. As long as we weren’t injured, dead, pregnant, or failing classes, no one was paying attention. It’s taken this long for us to figure out that we were not fine. Many of us are just now being diagnosed with things that were, in retrospect, bone obvious. It’s not a huge shock to me that Britney found solace in Adderall, let’s put it that way.

When I read the first part of the book that talked about Britney’s childhood, I felt this immediate recognition. Not only are we the same age, she had an alcoholic father and the “cool mom”, as did I. She started drinking with her mom when she was underage -as did I - and like me realized later that the “cool mom” wasn’t the mom she needed. She realized how her father’s alcoholism and inherited trauma set the course of her life before she took her first breath. Her late grandmother, Jean, was also committed to an institution and pumped full of lithium, mostly for grieving a dead child. Jamie Spears had a built-in roadmap for what to do with his daughter when she stepped out of line, when her grief swallowed her up. While there are differences in our stories, I couldn’t help but think would have happened if my working class blue collar family suddenly became overnight millionaires on the back of my fame. I know what happened when I started making even a little bit of money.

After all I did for you, palm outstretched.

What I do know is that if there had been cameras following my every move during the darker times in my life, people would have seen someone who was “crazy” and out of control. If the paparazzi had showed up to a variety of bars in New York City and watched me getting into a car at 2 am, no one would have thought, “wow, she really has her shit together”. If people saw me at the nadir of my pandemic era breakdown, sobbing and yelling and incoherent, no one would have cared if I had showed up for work the next day. If I’d had people in my life who wanted my money and my name, they might have locked me up too.

Or you.

Some people say that maybe she should be under a conservatorship because she posts videos of herself dancing. It strikes me that these videos are not professionally produced. She doesn’t have a hair and makeup team or a videographer. She’s got an iPhone and a big empty house. She’s expressing herself in the only way she knows how, the way she was groomed to by her parents, by America, by all of us. When she is described as “vacant eyed” or" “unstable”, or if her self expression is making you uncomfortable, ask yourself if you’d feel that way if it was wrapped in different packaging - polished, sanitized, choreographed, filtered. A woman dancing alone in her living room shouldn’t be more than we can handle. Maybe we see a little too much of our own trauma staring back at us, or we can’t handle that we had a hand in hers.

People think that Britney Spears - as she is now - is unworthy of the freedom we decided she deserved. We took the keys away from Jamie, but why are we so willing to hand them to someone else?

Britney Spears was effectively imprisoned for having a human response to fame, grief, divorce, and post-partum depression, and served a fourteen year sentence. I try to imagine if my abusive parent was my jailer. The gaslighting, the verbal abuse, the unreal restrictions. More than a decade of mental torture would break just about anyone. I think about my life from the age of 28 to 42, and the freedom I had to be completely unhinged on occasion without anyone taking away my human rights. I wasn’t forced to perform like a trained monkey and only able to eat chicken and vegetables with a fatphobic father tearing me apart over the fact of my body. I wasn’t force fed weapons grade pharmaceuticals and slut shamed over the course of twenty years over a standard issue breakup. I wasn’t forced to get an IUD, and I don’t have children who were used so brazenly as tools of manipulation and control. I wasn’t told that my very identity was now the property of my abuser.

I’ve seen Britney in concert three times, all during the course of the conservatorship. When I saw her in Vegas in 2016, we were close enough to the stage that if security wasn’t there I could have reached out and touched her. I remember feeling so starstruck seeing her up close, and marveling at how terrific she was and what a great show she was putting on. I can’t imagine how much it was costing her to be up on that stage while I drank vodka red bulls and sang along to every song. I danced for hours. I woke up the next morning with one of the most horrendous hangovers of my life and spent much of the day vomiting and crying in my hotel room. No cameras were present.

What was she feeling as she heard us cheer for her? I am not sure she felt love, or devotion, or joy. She heard the deafening noise of people cheering for her captivity, for her compliance, for her father. Even though we didn’t know the extent of the situation, we knew she was not the one calling the shots. It was for her own good, we told ourselves, as we soaked up all the joy from seeing one of our favorite pop stars, not knowing that we were complicit in stealing her joy one molecule at a time, to the point where she says she may never perform again.

I’d like to think that writing her own story is going to give Britney her power back. I’m not so sure, though. For some reason, this society has decided that no matter how hard she works to heal, she will never be able to erase Crazy Britney. She will never get past one haircut and a wild night out. Does it make us feel better to keep her forever strapped to that gurney, all of us silently holding her down? Or will we decide that even a “crazy” woman deserves the right to exist in the public eye exactly as she is?

I don’t think Britney Spears is crazy. And if she is…well, so are we.