However meager our lives, celebrity Instagram accounts offer certain reliable comforts: front-facing studio-quality portraits of our favorite stars standing or sitting alone in careful outfits; a high percentage of photos taken from the manubrium up, so that our entire phone screen is dominated by their proportional features. And, if the celebrity is Beyoncé-level famous, a gorgeous unending color story we can fall through forever: a block of white, silver, gold and indigo clearly curated by someone with the patience to learn color theory. This is the fame trade-off in 2019: We give them attention and a lightly engaged readership with the potential to translate to advertising revenue; they give us stylized, intimate glimpses of a life more elegant and photogenic than our own.

What is the result when someone ignores these conventions and attempts to use their account like a regular person? Clashing colors, “Minions” memes and cellphone videos shot from the middle distance. What is the result when that someone has spent decades living the cloistered existence of one of the most successful entertainers of all time, and has a limited understanding of what a regular person is like? The aberrant Instagram account of Britney Spears.

On Spears’s Instagram, the light is uncalibrated — as likely to charge in from floor-to-ceiling windows offering 360-degree California views as to issue from a single overhead light bulb located behind her, casting her face in shadow. Her feed is a place where frenetic, solitary dance routines are performed with total commitment for Spears’s unseen reflection in the mirror of her home gym, which is lined with purple string lights. It is a place where Britney can share her favorite quotes, be it a typographical exhortation to stay “extra sparkly” or a musing from Nietzsche about an artist’s inability to endure what is known as “reality.” But her most memorable, jolting posts are ones that crop up every once in a while, seemingly with no rhyme or reason to their frequency: Britney, alone, pretending to be walking on a runway inside her home.