It’s Britney, bitch. Last summer, on a road trip back from the Salton Sea, I found myself with ten hours to kill, a sufficiently gay co-pilot, and a burning question: what the hell is going on with Britney Spears? My friend and I turned to Britney’s Gram for answers, a comedy podcast that had improbably become the go-to source of news on Spears’ evolving legal battle against her conservatorship, and what would months later provide the single, crucial piece of unsubstantiated ‘inside information’ central to the New York Times’ documentary Framing Britney Spears, which positioned the pop superstar as a prisoner and catapulted a niche fandom’s #FreeBritney movement into the stuff of global zeitgeist. The conventional opinion, shared across the ideological spectrum from Fox News to the Times, is Britney Spears needs help. Here, I agree. I’m just not entirely convinced her family is the problem. And as someone living in San Francisco, a city where conservatorship has all but been eradicated, a city that has been brought to its knees by a crisis of mental illness, a city that has turned its most vulnerable citizens to the streets, out of sight out of mind and covered literally in their own feces — for the sake of compassion — I’ve been wondering: is doing nothing really “help”?

“Should we start from the beginning?” my friend asked.

“My body is ready,” I said.