Britney Spears accidentally got a bit too into Method acting in Crossroads

“The experience wasn’t easy for me. My problem wasn’t with anyone involved in the production but with what acting did to my mind,” she writes in a preview excerpt from People. “I think I started Method acting—only I didn’t know how to break out of my character. I really became this other person. Some people do Method acting, but they’re usually aware of the fact that they’re doing it. But I didn’t have any separation at all.”

As a result, Spears started walking and talking differently, she writes, which made her feel like “someone else for months.” The experience was so destabilizing, in fact, that she was “relieved” when it proved to be “the beginning and end of my acting career.”

“The Notebook casting came down to me and Rachel McAdams,” she continued, and while she says it would have been “fun to reconnect with Ryan Gosling after our time on the Mickey Mouse Club,” she’s ultimately “glad I didn’t do it.” “If I had, instead of working on my album In The Zone I’d have been acting like a 1940s heiress day and night.”

“I imagine there are people in the acting field who have dealt with something like that, where they had trouble separating themselves from a character,” she concluded. “I hope I never get close to that occupational hazard again. Living that way, being half yourself and half a fictional character, is messed up. After a while you don’t know what’s real anymore.”

The Woman In Me comes out October 24.