How Britney Spears Helped Me Through My Mental Health Struggles

In February 2007, pop singer Britney Spears was pushed to the brink of her sanity by the media. So she shaved her head in a hair salon in Los Angeles for the world to see.

I was only 9 years old, but I remember in vivid detail how the incident made her the ultimate punch line — even in an elementary schoolyard. Sure, we were children who had no idea how to make sense of such a pop culture circus. But we took our cues from the way the world broadcast it to us: Spears was a joke, an outcast, a burnout, an embarrassment — not a misguided young woman going through an intense mental health crisis. But that didn’t stop the entire world from critiquing her every move.

Even before her highly publicized breakdown, I didn’t concern myself too much with Spears because the adults around me signaled her music wasn’t appropriate for me.

The way people spoke about Spears then made me feel so uncomfortable — and not just because she was a punch line. It was as if her art, and therefore her personhood, didn’t matter because she made frivolous dance-pop and not “real music.” Listening to that kind of silly pop music was definitely not praised for boys. And frankly, little has changed in the heteronormative public perception of Spears in the years since.

I remember feeling distinctly uncomfortable as a child when Pink sang the words, “And what kind of father might hate his own daughter if she were gay?” I didn’t quite know what that meant yet — or that I was gay — but I was good at absorbing grown-ups’ emotions and reactions to pop culture. So when my mom gave me Spears’ “Circus” album on CD the next Christmas, it felt like I had reached a new milestone in life, one that allowed me to actually consume the things that fascinated me