My Loneliness Is Killing Me (And I...)

There is a reason I have spent 4 hours crying about Britney Spears and I am going to try to find out why. I stopped listening around 12 years old. There was a feeling like: Ok, sure, Britney Spears is cool and all, but liking her is not going to help me get laid by the white kid with dreads in the Dead Kennedy’s T-shirt. I abandoned her and most of my earlier female influences after getting my period and entering junior high school, the time where we finally self-realize last and for all, no more confusion about life or any other bs. During those preciously odd years, I needed to rebel against “normal” people and buy bobble heads at Spencers gifts, write Good Charlotte lyrics on my converse, and start a band called OUT COLD whose songs were about how much *NSYNC sucked. Thankfully I was a pretty shy kid so most of my “rebelliousness” took place in my own head. Unlucky for me, I own that head! And so began a journey into separateness and Teenage Dirtbag by Wheatus on repeat....

  The first time I saw her I was watching TV before third grade in my parents kitchen. A commercial for the Baby One More Time cd & cassette came on and my jaw was on the floor. She was my soulmate, my goddess, the most beautiful girl in the world. I went to school that day feeling like I had been electrocuted. There was someone out there that was going to make everything better and hotter. She was my muse in my preteen years and liberated the hell out of me as a shy Catholic school girl. Even if I didn’t speak more at school, I could go home and mirror dance to her music for hours. Before her I was really into Mariah Carey, Aqua and  JLo. But JLo and Mariah seemed more like adult women to me, and something fucky was happening with Aqua between the male rapper and the lead singer. That band was a big horny, influence. I would listen to them with my friend as we made Ken fuck Barbie’s younger, hotter sister Skipper, while Barbie was out getting the mail. 

But Britney wasn’t about horniness really. She channeled power and confidence. Alas the teens turned me punk, don’t get it twisted when I say punk I am talking about liking Avril Lavigne. More than that though, I started to “loathe” all things pop and hip. Britney was everything before I watched GHOST WORLD and realized I could somehow prop up my childhood loneliness into some sort of cool, jaded persona. That movie gave me permission to give power to my isolation and seek out music and culture, that would subconsciously perpetuate the divide I felt between me and my classmates. I’m too cool for social studies! I know that John and Yoko were a couple!! 

  My  adolescent darkness is not GHOST WORLD’s fault, but it was one of the first things I saw that seemed to encourage for better or for worse “uniqueness”. Though there’s nothing unique about predicating your identity on peoples perceptions of you. Again, I did not know. I was just stumbling into cool shit on this new thing called, “YouTube”. 

 Instead of fully engaging with the social world around me, I did find myself retreating into my mind and starting to decorate it with content about people and places far away from me- old talk show clips, Steven Wright stand up, and of course the Bud Dwyer footage. As I loaded my brain with uploads of grainy footage, I disconnected from my body. I think what is hurting me about the Britney doc has to do with my renouncing of my femininity as a teen, and turning myself towards more “intellectual fair” that was  partially about getting men to like me.

 The girls in my grade turned into flashing red threats as the wax wonderful world of childhood melted off  of us and revealed our bodies that quickly became objects to rank and compare. What a fabulous moment in life to disassociate! The lost teen in me who opted for hunting for art and old clips online rather than throwing herself more fully in her actual school work and social world is still finding her way in the present. The moral I wish someone would have blown smoke in my face and said to me at 14 is “Liking cool things doesn’t make you cool.”

 Once in high school, I stopped listening to pop pretty much all at once and got obsessed with John Lennon, Bob Dylan, and Johnny Cash. The amount of times I watched WALK THE LINE makes me nauseous and is somehow inseparable from the stench of an Arby’s roast beef and cheese sandwich and cigarette ash.  My teen obsessions took a masculine bent, heavily influenced by my fathers taste for 70s movies and my own certainty that my interests were somehow impressively dark and sophisticated and would make men have sex with me and give me eternal life which to me at the time were the same thing. I was out for power really, power that I didn't really feel in my body that I relentlessly scrutinized. At the same time, this was a period where I was more curious than ever so I am not going to stiff my nose at this phase of my life, I was learning about what I liked and that was healthy. It’s only in reflection that I see the venom of misogyny silence a bubbly, more feral part of me that was traded out for more intellectualizing.

The documentary which is chock full of misogynist media clips and headlines, gave me flashbacks to a tabloid magazine we had on our counter growing up ,that was entirely devoted to pointing out Mischa Barton’s cellulite. While looking at this magazine, I had a strange evil inside me feeling like “good, she’s ugly like me, ha-ha”  The cruelty towards women and women’s bodies that we ingested as children and internalized  feels caught in my throat this week,  and I have been retching over the toilet trying to get it out ever since. 

Back to highschool- My friend, Molly, and I adored Charlie Manson’s music and Ritalin. We would train into the city to get high on hookah, see the Deftones,  and change  into corsets on the train while slugging sour apple vodka.  All of this I really did love at the time, but there was also a rejection of self in it. Female artists weren’t a big part of my life in the years I ran around Westchester, New York doing drugs in the woods of Sleepy Hollow and listening to SKA and doing my share of wrist cutting rituals. I was never suicidal, but definitely “tortured”  and wanted you to know it, kiddo!** I am unsure I’ll ever have a clear lens on this time of my life. But I do know one thing, Britney was no longer part of the equation, and it showed. 

**“Kiddo” is what a man YOUNGER than me, called me the morning after we hooked up. It was not good sex. This was around 2011.

This part of quarantine feels like some sort of testing ground between the past and the future. Which one is next? More of the past or some awkward steps forward into a new, raw… future? If possible? A future no longer solely powered by masculine energy. If Britney isn’t the embodiment of the rejection of the divine feminine, you guys can suck my dick. (Meant to be a funny joke, not taken like a serious insult) While I don’t think during this time we should sit around and be human test experiments for streaming services,  (I mean why put out the most insanely dark documentaries during the most precarious moment in our existence?)  I do think closing ourselves from the dark has not led us anywhere. And, look, the Britney documentary was just a pointer, there was a lot of stuff I found under done about it, but I will hold my squabbles for perhaps more firmer times? 

Tis week has been a watery existence where my points of view seem to blur and confuse and mean nothing three minutes later. All I feel is my love for Britney reactivated and the tragic abandonment of that love. If this spoke to you, maybe there is a goddess inside that needs some love right now. I want better for my niece. I want depth in my 30s and I want to fight for Britney and the Britney in all of us who went crazy and shut down.