And the years go by as seconds

By Circe -

Found on Jezebel/Gawker, as I find many unintentionally interesting things.

What I find curious is how much chattering there is in the comments about the time she shaved her head. Apparently that's a huge sign of crazy for many people -- goes to show how much of a woman's social capital is contained in her appearance, if she's perceived to have lost any talent or skill or personal value she might have previously had. Beauty is the last refuge of women who feel like they have nothing else.

Personally, I think shaving her head was quite possibly the sanest, smartest thing she did during her entire breakdown. She wanted to express how she was feeling, and jolt whoever was in charge of her into goddamn changing something. A lot of people have found a lot of ways to externalize that feeling, and most of them are seriously damaging to themselves and others. To be sure, she did a lot of those -- it's just that shaving her head wasn't one of them. It's hair. It grows back. But, as a lot of the people in charge of her life at that point were heavily invested in getting her thin and pretty and back on stage making money, it shocked the hell out of them, and very publicly derailed their plans for the next several months at the very least.

I know from personal experience that your logic goes completely out the window during a nervous breakdown, and she's truly lucky that either she was creative enough or her thought processes were coincidentally loopy enough to lead to 'make a statement by shaving my head' rather than 'make a statement by taking all of the pills in the house'.

I've always thought that Britney Spears was one of those people who could have been just as happy, if not more, if she'd never been famous. Or if she'd stopped after her Mouseketeer times. Go home to Louisiana, use the money she earned to buy a nice middle-class house, get married, have some kids, and every so often bring out photographs of the days when she was on TV.

I don't really have much in common with her, but she's my age, and she hit it big while I was a teenager. She's been on magazine covers half my life. It's hard to watch someone for that long -- trying, as far as I can tell, to be a decent person, and now a decent mother -- and not develop some sort of opinion. I'm told now someone else has control of her conservatorship (her father? I think?) who actually seems to give a damn about her welfare. Took 'em long enough.

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