The pop icon reflects on the highs and lows of her career in her new memoir ‘The Woman in Me,’ excerpted here

When Britney Spears shaved her head during a difficult period in her life in 2007, the tabloids pounced.

The pop star, who was going through a painful divorce at the time, was already a constant paparazzi target and gossip fixture, and the head-shaving incident seemed to support a narrative that she had become erratic.

But what was Spears herself thinking at the time?

“I’d been eyeballed so much growing up. I’d been looked up and down, had people telling me what they thought of my body, since I was a teenager,” she writes in her much-anticipated memoir, The Woman in Me, out Oct. 24 and excerpted exclusively in this week’s PEOPLE cover story.

“Shaving my head and acting out were my ways of pushing back,” Spears adds in the book.

Related: Britney Spears Opens Up: ‘Finally Free’ to Share Her Story in Bombshell Memoir & New Interview — ‘No More Lies’ (Exclusive)

After Spears, 41, was put in a court-ordered conservatorship in 2008, granting her father and a lawyer control over her financial and personal affairs, she says she was forbidden from keeping the new look.

“Under the conservatorship I was made to understand that those days were now over,” she writes. “I had to grow my hair out and get back into shape. I had to go to bed early and take whatever medication they told me to take.”

Marco Piraccini\Archivio Marco Piraccini\Mondadori via GettyBritney Spears performs her Piece of Me Las Vegas residency in June 2016

While Spears recorded and released four successful albums and headlined her Piece of Me Las Vegas residency during what would be a nearly 14-year conservatorship, she was desperately unhappy.

“I would do little bits of creative stuff here and there, but my heart wasn’t in it anymore. As far as my passion for singing and dancing, it was almost a joke at that point,” she writes. “Thirteen years went by with me feeling like a shadow of myself.”

Spears continues, “I think back now on my father and his associates having control over my body and my money for that long and it makes me feel sick… Think of how many male artists gambled all their money away; how many had substance abuse or mental health issues. No one tried to take away their control over their bodies and money. I didn’t deserve what my family did to me.”