Pop singer Britney Spears just released a few excerpts from her upcoming memoir, “The Woman in Me,” and discussed how she felt about being under a conservatorship plus gave more insight into her public breakdowns.
The 41-year-old celebrity shared portions of the book with People. Spears said she felt like a “robot” under the conservatorship managed by her father, Jamie Spears.
“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,” the recording artist wrote in the book. “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.”
She went on to say how being in the conservatorship made her feel like “a shadow” of herself.
“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,” Spears continued in the excerpt.
She added, “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. 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.”
Spears also discussed the infamous incident in 2007 when she shaved her head. “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,” the “Toxic” singer said, per People. “Shaving my head and acting out were my ways of pushing back.”
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She said the conservatorship kept her from doing what she wanted. “Under the conservatorship I was made to understand that those days were now over,” she writes. “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 wrote.
“I think back now on my father and his associates having control over my body and my money for that long and it makes me feel sick… Think of how many male artists gambled all their money away; how many had substance abuse or mental health issues. No one tried to take away their control over their bodies and money. I didn’t deserve what my family did to me.”
Spears’ conservatorship ended in November 2021 after a highly publicized court battle. Fans have since expressed concern for the pop singer’s welfare as she’s known to share strange videos on social media, including a recent post where she appeared to be dancing around her house with real butcher knives.