Member-only story
Why I’m So Worked Up About Britney Spears
(CW: Suicide and hospital trauma)
When I was probably too young, I watched the movie Frances with my mother. Staring Jessica Lange, the movie came out in 1982, and tells the story of movie star Frances Farmer and her tragic descent into institutionalization and eventually, horrifically, lobotomy. Farmer’s greatest threat to her safety and freedom is her mother, who eventually authorizes the ice pick lobotomy. That scene is still difficult to watch. In another harrowing scene, Jessica Lange screams in court after she’s sentenced to a jail term, “Have I got any rights?” I wonder the same about Britney Spears.
I’m not sure how old I was when I watched Frances. I was ten when it came out, but I might have been older when I sat in the family room of our split-level ranch house in Western, NY, and wept with my mother. If I was twelve or thirteen, I would have been “cured” from my rare neurological disorder, Dopa Responsive Dystonia, by a specialist in Toronto.
He prescribed synthetic dopamine and within a week or two I started walking when before I could barely walk down a hallway without falling or assistance. My muscles relaxed and no longer spasmed in pain. I could sleep, write, talk, and suddenly pass as abled. I had shifted from the space of visibly disabled to invisibly disabled in a matter of weeks…
