Britney Spears says her soul is too crushed to make more music

With the release of Britney Spears’ memoir, The Woman In Me, revelations from the book have begun filtering out onto the Internet. Tidbits about her work on Crossroads and her relationship with Justin Timberlake (specifically an abortion she got when they were together) have already made waves online. On Friday, more excerpts from the book circulated, with more information on her infamous mental health episode in which she shaved her head, her conservatorship, and the future of her career.

Per excerpts from The New York Times, Spears claims she was never into hard drugs or drank excessively (“It was never as wild as the press made it out to be,” she explains, though she did enjoy Adderall because “it gave me a few hours of feeling less depressed”). The 2007 episode in which she shaved her head and attacked a paparazzo’s car occurred because she was “out of my mind with grief” over the loss of her aunt and the custody battle with ex-husband Kevin Federline: “With my head shaved, everyone was scared of me, even my mom. Flailing those weeks without my children, I lost it, over and over again. I didn’t even really know how to take care of myself.”

Spears writes, “I am willing to admit that in the throes of severe postpartum depression, abandonment by my husband, the torture of being separated from my two babies, the death of my adored aunt Sandra, and the constant drumbeat of pressure from paparazzi, I’d begin to think in some ways like a child.”

The conservatorship enacted by her father infantilized her further. While shaving her head was a way of “pushing back” on the constant surveillance she experienced as a child star, “under the conservatorship I was made to understand that those days were now over. 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” (via People). She shares in the memoir, “I became a robot. But not just a robot—a sort of child-robot. I had been so infantilized that I was losing pieces of what made me feel like myself. The conservatorship stripped me of my womanhood, made me into a child. I became more of an entity than a person onstage. I had always felt music in my bones and my blood; they stole that from me.”

The conservatorship completely diminished her passion for her career. “My music was my life, and the conservatorship was deadly for that; it crushed my soul,” she says. That feeling persists even now that the conservatorship is over. “Pushing forward in my music career is not my focus at the moment,” Spears writes. “It’s time for me not to be someone who other people want; it’s time to actually find myself.”