Britney Spears infamously shaved her head in 2007, and now she's explainging why
"I’d been eyeballed so much growing up. I’d been looked up and down, had people telling me what they thought of my body since I was a teenager,” she writes in an excerpt from her new memoir, The Woman in Me, per People. "Shaving my head and acting out were my ways of pushing back."
A year later, Spears entered into her court-ordered conservatorship, where her father, Jamie, and a lawyer had almost total control over her personal and financial affairs.
"Under the conservatorship, I was made to understand that those days were now over,” she explains. “I had to grow my hair out and get back into shape. I had to go to bed early and take whatever medication they told me to take."
Spears then describes how her passion for singing and dancing was basically non-existent, and that during the course of the 13-year conservatorship, she felt like “a shadow” of herself.
On Feb. 16, 2007, after attending rehab for a day, the singer shaved her head at a Los Angeles salon. As Spears said in 2008, she was going through a difficult divorce with Kevin Federline and a custody battle involving their two sons at the time.
“I was going through so much artificial stuff with my kids and Kevin at the time. He’d just left me and I was devastated,” she told MTV in 2008 for the release of the documentary For the Record. “People thought that it was me going crazy and stuff like that, but people shave their heads all the time. I was going through a lot, but it was just kind of like me going through a little bit of rebellion, or feeling free, or shedding stuff that had happened, you know?”
Spears’ new book, The Woman in Me is slated for release on Oct. 24.
