Peace Britney Spears,
I’m writing this to you because I really don’t want to talk about what happened, but I can tell you what happened. You would get it. Like: you would not "get it" as in you know exactly how I feel. You would get it as in you get the singularity… the uniquely lonely experience of being way more important and visible than anyone can realistically prepare for. You are certain you are having moments that less than ten people on earth get. You know? Let me give you an example.
In October of last year, I was in Sierra Leone on a mission I would have given anything to not be on. I live in Sierra Leone, but I wanted to be in Chicago, where my friend had begun the active processes of dying, and if I could have cancelled the rice harvest to be there and soak up any last moments with them I would have… but if I hadn’t gone home I’m pretty sure all that rice I’ve been working on growing for the last two years would have died and many hundreds of hungry people would be betrayed and maybe also die, so I wept and wept and then I got on a fucking plane. The first day of the harvest, we were on our way to the fields from the city and stopped to buy foodstuffs for everyone laboring once we got out of the city proper. It was around 9am, so the rush traffic was dying down. I only needed to buy breads and fruits but so many of them rushed out with baskets on their heads. Kids. Preteens and teenagers selling food to passersby for their parents or for their bellies. Last time I saw a preteen that broke my heart, it was when I did a hospital visit and spent time with a teenage boy who had his spine broken. Someone addicted to kush (the drug that’s been flooding my country's streets) tried to rob a child for money, and in his fury at this kid having nothing, he picked him up and threw him against a wall, severely damaging his spine. That kid looked at us, the adults around him in his hospital room, with a childlike desperation of contending with mortality.
These kids had a different kind of desperation. The daily drive of a hungry circumstance, of running faster than their peers to a car, of getting someone already spending money to spend a little more for you. I kept trying not to make eye contact with the girl selling eggs and I kept failing. I bought my bread, knowing we had to get going; she looked at me once I said no to her (again). I explained I didn’t need eggs; we run the risk of them breaking on the bumps down to the boule land. She gazed back at me and said, “eh, ma."
There’s no English equivalent for that, but imagine the palpable, desperation-driven disappointment when an infant child whimpers, mom– mommy! when you have to put them down and all they want is to be held. I’m such a crybaby. I didn’t want her to see me cry.
So I put on an air of exasperation, like I had been ground down by her bargaining and guilt-tripping and not like I would burst into tears. I said, “Listen, just take the leones. I don’t need the eggs but take ten leones.” And I did that in front of everyone, all these teenagers physically pressed up against my window. I couldn’t just give one the ten leones. So I started handing them out to the kids, as quickly as I could so that no more child merchants would see what was happening and run to swarm the car. Even then ten or fifteen kids I had in front of me started to swarm a bit at the sight of the money. I said, calm down. It’s just paper. They calmed a bit, but then my driver forced the window up. He was calling them criminals. They got agitated again. I yelled at him and dropped the window, more frantic with giving the bills away, and then my friend in the back was yelling too, telling me some had kept sticking their hands out, and before I could scream who cares? It’s ten leones! my driver put the window back up and started to roll off, so the kids jumped back from the car so they wouldn’t get their toes run over. I just sat there and focused on not crying. I had already put my makeup on. Even today, I think about the sound– that plunking sound– that happened when my driver rolled away, and the children who had fingers stuck in the window had their hands tugged and ripped a bit as the car started moving. Plunk plunk plunkplunkplunkplunkplunk.
Ten leones is a little less than fifty cents, by the way.
Then, right after that core memory moment, I had to steady my face into something passive and friendly so we could get through the police checkpoints without getting stopped. I already put on all my makeup for harvest day and if I cry, we will get pulled over so I cannot afford to feel what just happened. I arrive to the boule lands just as the machine is pulling onto the fields.
I perform my job brilliantly: smile, dance, say prayers, thank the land, bring joy, exude wealth and abundance. I had to give that ceremony justice, and that performance goes so much deeper than a brave face. You have to conduct the energy of belief and concentration into triumph. The easy part, honestly, was raising all the money to make this happen; the hard part has been breathing life into abandoned beliefs: that it’s worth it to support people you can’t see, that communities can be sovereign, intertribal trust… enough hope to think a few generations instead of the other side of a starving belly. I can’t imagine this feeling, this mode of conduction, is all that different than putting on a concert when you feel the music in your blood and bones. The output of the role is different, but the feeling of dissolution is the same: you bury your personal desires and feelings to take part in something far bigger than you. In doing so, you become larger than your own individual life. Systems are, of course, larger than any one particular part.
I chose to write this to you because I am a a writer and also because I am a princess– a direct descendent of Paramount Chief Bombolai of the Limba Tribe in modern day Sierra Leone. Since the role and circumstance are usually too much to explain, I either never mention this or only bring up this reality if it’s excruciatingly relevant. But princess is a title and a job that comes with incredible responsibility and dangerous amounts of visibility– especially because mine is the only chiefdom in the nation state that is indigenous to the region. I inherited a dilapidated, disenfranchised kingdom and my whole job is to radiate and concentrate enough joy, fertility, and money such that desperate people are willing to work past their hunger, work through the night, work even when they cannot see me to build infrastructure. This rice harvest was the first industrialized production of country rice since we were targeted in for our rice cultivation skills in the Atlantic Slave trade. Not even including my career as a writer and artist, I’m a geopolitical figure by blood, but because I am also a really pretty girl with the title “princess," I have to sit there and let people snicker. Meanwhile, I have to figure out how to expand the free clinic I’m buying the blueprints for to include kush rehabilitation so I don’t keep seeing kids with severed spines on hospital visits, but whatever. I just shut up, lest people think I am being hyperbolic.
Anyways: I’m writing this letter (and series of essays) to you because I keep having those experiences where it’s like I don’t know that I will ever be able to explain what the fuck is happening to me right now. I don’t even think people will believe me. This is the bit where I’m like, yeah, Britney would get it. You know how wild your story is? Not only are you in the unlikely and unfortunate experience of being the biggest star in the world at the time, of your day, you also have to do so under the conditions of professional and legal… indentured servitude to your abusive father? What? How do you even begin to say this to a worldwide fanbase? How the fuck do you begin to write a book like The Woman In Me? Do you know how grateful I am to have read it? I binged it. Took it all in like a shot and then just sat there. Afterwards, I picked up a pen and thought about myself from outside of me, the twenty something year old that’s in unimaginable shit. I honestly have little desire to talk about what happened, but I know I need to if I want to heal all the fracturing and dissolution that comes with performance, grief, and visibility. Plus, I owe you a lot. You sing my first favorite song. You were my first favorite pop star. I thought you were incredible, especially when you danced with your stomach out.I still think that! I always wanted to grow up and wear crop tops because of you and Lindsay Lohan. You wrote The Woman In Me and it’s helping me name the shape of my own self.
Mrs. Spears: I publicly crashed out in November of 2025, on Instagram. It caused a lot of damage and I, in blasphemy, continue to think this damage was worth my overall goals. In this moment, a few months removed, and even in the time and space I’ve had to reflect closer to the fact: I stand by the use of insanity. In terms of a narrative I could withstand, it was so much easier to be seen as “crazy" than seen as lying. I know I am in a fantastical circumstance. If I state it all at once, it really does sound crazy. I’d rather have time and space to explain myself, time and space to keep private what I don’t want seen rather than try my hardest to be heard and seen in desperation and have people… wonder if this was just part of the performance.
All that said:
The Uses of Insanity is a series of essays written and recorded by ismatu gwendolyn.
In publishing a collection of letters written to Britney Spears, they seek to analyze the performance of their own construction of a public self, the @ismatu.gwendolyn character, which ran from 2022 to 2025. The essays work to define expression and markers of cultural myths as well as argue for the uses of insanity for sovereignty amongst individuals and communities.
This essay series will define and further contextualize the following nouns while re-examining previously argued theses:
(1) Reality becomes what we collectively witness | definition of the object, the symbol, and the cultural myth.
Original source: the strip club did indeed make me bonkers!
(2) The proliferation of screens allows for entire narratives to be constructed off the emotion of the picture. | definition of performance, entertainment, and propaganda.
Original source: you’ve been traumatized into hating reading (and it’s making you easier to oppress).
(3) Sanity and beauty are a means by which we police one another into compliance. Freedom exists where madness resides. | definition of authenticity.
Original source: Therapists Are Also the Police: Sex Work, Social Work, and the Politics of Deservingness, There is no Revolution without Madness, There is No Safety in Being Beautiful.
(4) Should we be willing to deviate from the mandated addictions of comfort, we could invent new, powerful cultural myths which further our ability to create and sustain power movements. | definition of metacognition, fungibility, and "scyborg."
Original source: Drugs are fucking everywhere (and we are all addicted to comfort), Notes on A Third University is Possible
Thank you for existing and thank you for the dance videos you post on Instagram now. I appreciate you so much.
warmest regards,
ismatu gwendolyn
To the Live Studio Audience:
I send these essays out through my cyber space, Threadings., on purpose. Even if these essays are not intended for you as the primary audience, I still expect you to participate in the construction of thought.
If Britney Spears, during her conservatorship, ripped off the mic and ran into the crowd. If she started screaming out into the mic, CONSERVATORSHIP!! THEY HAVE ME! – how far do you think she would get? Never mind the fact that sound would have cut her mic the moment she got the o vowel of “con—” and that’s assuming her mic was live. The trigger for Spears’ family locking her away for months in psychiatric incarceration was her saying, “I don’t want to do that one. It’s too hard.” She simply said no according to the limits of her body and that got her locked in psychiatric incarceration for months. I’m traumatized after three weeks in circumstances that were demonstrably better than what she faced. She was forcibly drugged for months. What do you think would have happened to her if she tried to signal she was in danger with fury, fear, jubilance, exhilaration– any sort of emotion that made people pay attention?
Britney Spears is so deep into a singular plot of life, where everyone gazes and gawks at her, that much of the world– maybe most of the world– would look at her crying out under conservatorship and assume it was either part of the performance or that she was having a psychotic break. Did you know what a conservatorship was before Britney Spears’ case was discussed in the mainstream? Because I didn’t. Did the public know that Britney’s father was abusive? Do you know how much time it would have to take to have her to explain her circumstance to us in a way we could comprehend? A spotlight is as good as a tightrope: no matter how fervently you mean it, no matter if the authenticity is attached to your bone, people will assume that any deviation from your role could only be a genuine lapse in cognitive ability or all a part of the script. Who would voluntarily fall off a tightrope? Why would anyone choose to fall?
I pose these next three questions for discussion in the comment section.
(1) In previous iterations of life (like 2007, when Spears famously shaved her head), regular Western society did not have access to a regular spaces of performance that was seen by nature as an authentic expression of self; nowadays, social media has become a cyberspace common grounds, of sorts. Imagine you were a public figure in modern day who regularly uses your social media presence to perform a specific cultural role. How scared do you (you, personally) have to be to turn to Instagram in crisis– not to ask for money, but to explain severe and longterm, obscure life circumstances? How close to death or serious decay? How much urgency has to occur before you decide to publicly embarrass yourself by way of severe deviation from social convention? Would you choose to try or would you choose to stay silent and risk dealing with matters yourself?
Discussion Question One: Try in earnest and be called crazy? Or act crazy and be called crazy? What sort of circumstances would compel the desire to “be" crazy?
If the answer is, “Yes, I would use my Instagram,” proceed to question two. If you would refuse and preserve your privacy and brand narrative, answer question 1a.
1a) Have you ever been in danger such that you have feared for your life?
(2) Then, in the event you do decide to say something: as a performer, you know that most people are so immersed in the culture of spectacle and celebrity that they forget they are watching a performance. You have to consider how your presentation of character break will be received. Do you have the wherewithal to watch people see you tell the whole truth, as quickly and effectively as you can, and get in the comments and:
- debate as to whether you are serious and should be taken seriously,
- are serious and showing signs of complete mental break,
- or are performing?
Discussion Question Two: Would you choose to communicate in sincerity? Or would you choose to break character with a different, weirder performance?
(3) What happens if your body, mind, or circumstance is seen as a performance at every juncture in life and not just when you are (physically or metaphysically) on stage?
As far as my answers go:
Many of you (audience member) witnessed what I chose, but I will explain over the course of the next few essays. Now that I’ve phrased it like this: can we comprehend why I might have chosen to tell a story than just… tell you what was true? Why I might have preferred to come off as incomprehensible?
peace.
IG