- The music video for "
Everytime " premiered in 2004, just as Spears' public image began crumbling. - The video showed the damaging effects of the paparazzi's abuse, but many ignored the message.
- For me, "Everytime" was the first chilling sign of her public struggles to come.
Britney Spears' single "Everytime" doesn't come up often. Unlike her other dance-pop singles, the soft ballad isn't woven into the fabric of early-2000s nostalgia.
But when I first heard the song's opening line, "Notice me," it twisted like a knife. Spears' plea was sung with a whispered urgency, contrasting the bright tone of her other hit songs.
The first time I saw the ballad's accompanying 2004 music video, it felt like watching a cry for help. As a diehard 13-year-old fan, I felt something akin to fear as the video's narrative unfolded, showing Spears and a fictional boyfriend viciously fighting after they're hounded by paparazzi, leaving Spears seemingly suicidal in a bathtub.
Even at that age, I recognized a version of myself in the young woman sinking beneath the water, unsure of whether she wants to be alive, willing to let silence drown out the noise in her head.
"Everytime" came out in 2003 when it felt like everyone - particularly the sales-driven magazine
Eighteen years and one much-publicized documentary later, public interest is once again swirling around Spears and her personal struggles. This time, more and more people have finally realized just how Spears' treatment was twisted and harmful.
Now people can go back and watch the music video for "Everytime" and feel the crushing clarity that only hindsight provides. But I've spent the past 17 years thinking about the version of Spears I saw in that video, unable to comprehend why the world refused to listen.
'Everytime' coincided with a new, darker phase in both Spears' career and in my life
Spears' fourth studio album, "In the Zone," was released in November 2003 with the single, "Me Against the Music." Then came "Toxic," Spears' most universally beloved hit.
It was the same year I miserably entered eighth grade. Like many middle schoolers, I spent most of my days unable to comfortably navigate cliques of mean girls and the derision of boys.
I never felt like a "cool" kid, whatever that meant. My family moved around a lot when I was younger, so friends were a rarity until I was in middle school. The easiest way to fit in was to tap into whatever was popular, so I turned to
My parents had finally divorced by 2003 and, acting as a classic middle-child mediator, I was carrying on outwardly as perfectly fine. The only sign of my distress came when I developed trichotillomania, a hair-pulling compulsion, and slowly but determinedly removed all of my eyebrows from my face until I resembled an alien version of a pubescent middle schooler.
Throughout it all, Britney had been my beacon of unattainable cool. I plastered my bedroom walls with torn-out pages from J-14 and Tiger Beat magazine, and wished every day I could be like her. I saw Spears' fame as an escape, as the dream alternative to my own small life.
But soon enough things changed for both of us.
As I entered adolescence, Spears was shifting her image from soda-pop princess to sexy, "empowered" woman. Two of my best friends lost their virginity by the end of eighth grade - while I hadn't come close to a proper first kiss - and it felt as though Spears was giving me a road map to understanding sex, relationships, and the murky waters of womanhood.
But the music video for "Everytime" showed me what was on the other side of the fame and power I once thought would be an ideal escape. I saw what happened when the world builds a young woman up, only to tear her down.
It also marked a new phase in Spears' career. Her personal life became a breeding ground for vitriol amplified by tabloid media. During the same year of the video's release, Spears married her childhood friend in Las Vegas only to be annulled 55 hours later. By the end of 2004, Spears was married to Kevin Federline.
The pop star was hounded, harassed, and stalked by photographers who wanted unflattering angles. It didn't stop once Spears became a mother the next year. If anything, the media scrutiny increased with paparazzi desperate for "evidence" for the way Spears was failing as a new mother.
Spears and Federline filed for divorced months before the now-infamous day in which the singer shaved her own head in view of dozens of paparazzi in 2007. Spears eventually lost custody of her two children and was placed into a conservatorship.
Meanwhile, tabloids, which seemingly drove her to desperate measures (like whacking an SUV with an umbrella after begging to be left alone) then labeled her actions as "crazy."
Privately, sources close to Spears believed she was suffering from postpartum depression, according to The New York Times and the "Framing Britney Spears" documentary.
Finding my own strength is tied to Spears' own perseverance over the past two decades
When "Everytime" was released, the gnawing desire to escape the world was all too familiar to me, even at 13.
I started high school that year and began dating and learning for myself what it meant to have your heart broken and affections abused. I spent too much time in a relationship with the kind of guy who might throw a vase across the room rather than understand my deepening depressive episodes.
Fumbling through my teenage years was like getting my own crash course in the patriarchal garbage that was dumped on Spears. My own story felt familiar to the one Spears projected in "Everytime," and I found comfort in knowing that I wasn't alone down there in the muck of it all.
Now Spears has slowly resurfaced into the public's grace at the center of a new reckoning over how the world treats famous women. Punching down at superstars undergoing personal struggles isn't trendy anymore.
After the Hulu documentary's premiere back in February, it seemed as if the whole world was suddenly on Team Britney. But all I could think about was "Everytime" and how the past 17 years have felt like rewatching a slow-motion train wreck Spears had already shown me.
I have found a new strength on the other side of my adolescence now that I'm firmly in my 30s, and believe at least part of that is tethered to the quiet yet enduring strength Spears has managed to project over the past 20 years. It still pains me to know that not enough people were listening to her distress at the time when she likely needed it most, but there's some solace in the reckoning we're having now.
"Notice me," she pleaded in the song's opening line. Some of us did. The rest are finally catching up.