Everyone is Like Britney Spears After Leaving a High Control Religion
There are a couple moments from my time in high school that coincide with cultural moments that have always stuck with me. I suppose they would be considered moments of regret. They are definitely moments that I wish I could have done differently. I don’t shame myself for them—I was young, I was living in a very specific culture, at a specific time, and was doing the best that I could. But if my adult self could have a conversation with my younger self, I think there would have been a different result. One of those moments is signing my True Love Waits Card back in 1993…I wonder what would have been different if I would have actually known what that meant, or had a caring adult to talk to about my developing body, relationships, or sex.
Another one of those moments was when I was in a school (choir) variety show in the late 90’s and I was asked to dress up in a navy velvet dress with a beret-like hat as the “White House Intern Barbie” since I had dark hair and everyone else in the sketch had blonde hair. I got a ton of laughs as I walked across the stage waving my mini-American flag but I can still feel the sense of grossness rise in my body as I write about that memory now as I did back then.
And then there was my senior year in high school when I was able to take college composition courses in lieu of my high school English classes. I think, deep down, I knew that when I was offered the opportunity to take college classes, I had to take it. I think I knew that there was a very real possibility that I needed to take advantage of and get ahead educationally in the chance that I didn’t have opportunities to take college courses later on. In my second semester of college composition courses, we began writing research papers and my first paper was on…Britney Spears.
Though I had not yet fully “made my faith my own”, I was inching toward that path. In my mind, high school was where I could be rebellious and then when I graduated, I would fully commit to God. The only problem was that I was so terrified of hell, the consequences of sin, and disappointing my parents, that I actually didn’t do anything *that* bad. Other than a cuss word here or there—for which I felt immediate guilt—I skipped school during the last couple classes of the day on a weekly basis and that was about it.
My decision to write about Britney Spears and the horrible influence she was on teen girls was a feeble attempt to tiptoe into the pious world that I knew I was about to enter. In tandem with this paper, I was reading And the Bride Wore White, which had just been released; one can imagine this deeply impacted my assessment of Ms. Spears.
I wish I could find that old paper and paste excerpts of it here in this article but it’s long gone now. Saved on some hard disk that is surely in a landfill somewhere (for those of you who don’t know what a hard disk is, it’s what we saved documents on before we had USB drives or iClouds or Google Workspace). But I know I tore her to shreds. And I know I was praised for it.
I don’t completely understand why, out of all the Mousketeers, Britney was the one that ended up in the spotlight the way she did. Perhaps it’s her family and childhood (which I suspect does play a large role in it). There were many others that she performed with that are A-list celebrities, movie stars and singers who top the charts that seem to live a life where they are known for things other than their mistakes.
Britney seems to be known for her messiness.
And that’s why she’s back in the news. For her messiness. And, like every time before, people are talking. (I mean, I get it, I’m talking too…but hear me out, I think I probably have a little bit of a different take than what most people are saying!)
And now there is more bizarre behavior, spending loads of money, ambulances called, physical injury and people are weighing in. The public, armchair experts, even actual psychological experts. Some saying that she needs to be forcibly medicated or needs a new conservatorship.
I am not a Britney apologist. I haven’t done a deep dive into her life. I’m not her therapist, nor do I want to diagnose her. I am only someone who is about the same age as her, grew up during the same time as her and grew up inside of a high control system just like she did and then I was in a high control relationship like she was. I got out when I was in my early 30’s; she got out when she was in her early 40’s. I was doing in my 30’s what I should have been doing in my adolescence and 20’s and she seems to be doing that in her 40’s.
Does that mean that she should be on medication, or under supervision, or have her bank accounts frozen, or that there is something wrong with her? I have no idea. Should we be concerned for her? Maybe. Probably just like we should have been concerned for ourselves when we were released into the wild after coming out of high control religions, systems, and relationships ourselves and were trying to figure out what it was like to be an adult for the first time even though we had chronologically been one for a couple decades…