Britney Spears Has Always Known What She’s Doing

In her poignant new memoir, Spears revisits some of the darkest moments of her mental health struggles, many of which played out before the public eye. But even during those disoriented-seeming moments, it becomes clear that Spears has always been someone who knew what she was doing. In 2007, for instance, when Spears famously shaved her head, the press were quick to call the headline-making moment a mental breakdown. Yet, in her telling, it was more of an act of rebellion. “My long hair was a big part of what people liked—I knew that. I knew a lot of guys thought long hair was hot,” writes Spears. “Shaving my head was a saying of saying to the world: Fuck you. You want me to be pretty for you? Fuck you. . . I was tired of it.”

Around this time, Spears released Blackout, her masterful pop album featuring tracks such as “Gimme More” and “Piece of Me”—work that she considers among her strongest. “Recording for Blackout, I felt so much freedom,” writes Spears. “I loved that no one was overthinking things and that I got to say what I liked and didn’t like. . . Despite my reputation at the time, I was focused and excited to work when I came in. It’s one of the most satisfying albums I ever made.”

Spears has always been someone who deserves more credit than we’ve given her—and this applies to the present day, too. Near the end of her memoir, the pop star touches on her polarizing Instagram page, where she regularly stages the kind of behavior usually masked from public view: dancing with abandon, posting nudes, and trying on new clothes in a chaotic, haphazard manner. To many, Spears’s content is cringe-worthy—something that’s hard to look at (or away from). But for the star, it’s another means of regaining agency—to have autonomy over what she posts, and how she posts it. “I know that a lot of people don’t understand why I love taking pictures of myself naked or in new dresses,” writes Spears. “But I think if they’d been photographed by other people thousands of times, prodded and posed for other people’s approval, they’d understand that I get a lot of joy from posing the way I feel sexy and taking my own picture, dong whatever I want with it.”