The Woman in Me

“With my family, anything could go wrong at any time. I had no power there. Only while performing was I truly invincible.”

Spears introduces her childhood feelings of powerlessness within the dynamic of her family, foreshadowing their role in her full loss of autonomy during her conservatorship. For much of her early life, she views Music as a Source of Power for her in the face of the unpredictability of her home life.

“I had tried to go back to being an ordinary teenager, but it hadn’t worked. I still wanted something more.”

Spears’s life is different from normal teenagers due to her participation in the entertainment industry. Though she sometimes finds the pressures of life as a performer to be intense, when she tries to take a break, she feels as if there is something missing from her life.

“I couldn’t help but notice that the questions [Justin Timberlake] got asked by talk show hosts were different from the ones they asked me. Everyone kept making strange comments about my breasts, wanting to know whether or not I’d had plastic surgery.”

The experience of being a young star is different for Spears than it is for her male co-stars. She notices that she is sexualized from a young age in a way that her male counterparts are not.