What Dolly Parton taught me before I knew she was teaching me anything at all.
I was singing “9 to 5” in my kitchen years before I’d worked a single day for anyone. My own little cassette player on the counter, a tea towel in my hand, drying dishes. I didn’t know I was memorizing a feminist anthem. I didn’t know it was a protest — a song about being underpaid, overlooked, and quietly furious — because Dolly had folded all of that fury inside a melody so bright it made me want to dance with the cutlery. I just knew the words felt good in my mouth. That’s the kind of teaching that doesn’t announce itself. It moves in while you’re grinning and rearranges the furniture, and you don’t notice until years later that you live somewhere different now.
I’ve come to think the ones who change us most arrive exactly like that — dressed as something you’d never think to take seriously, so that by the time you understand what they were, you’ve already become it. She did it to me more than once. I’m only going back to count the times now that she’s gone.
For a long stretch of my working life, I was told that if I wanted less attention I could dress in boxier suits. More androgynous. Less feminine. Easier to take seriously. And I did it — I want to be honest about that. I was heavily influenced by it. I lacked Dolly’s conviction, at the beginning, in who I was.
I’d catch the result in a professional headshot and see someone impressive. Confident, capable — a hot shot, even. And I could not find myself anywhere in her. It was a small, private dysmorphia: I’d study my own picture and come away uneasy, searching the face for a woman I couldn’t locate, not knowing why she wasn’t there. I called it professional. It was erasure. One morning at a time.
What brought me back wasn’t a decision. It was accumulation — travel, other cultures, years of exposure that kept reintroducing me to the part of me people always responded to anyway: the kind part, the gentle part, the creative, fun-loving, feminine part the boxy suits were designed to hide. Eventually I understood that standing in that gave me credibility where it actually mattered. I could present myself in a way I delighted in, rather than in a way that delighted others.
I found the words for it late, watching a grainy clip of Dolly across from Barbara Walters in 1977 — turquoise jumpsuit, blonde wig — being asked why she didn’t just dress like a serious woman. Why the wig. Why the extreme clothes. “It’s certainly a choice,” Dolly said. “I would never stoop so low as to be fashionable. That’s the easiest thing in the world to do.”
There were years I wondered the same thing Walters did — why she’d choose to look so easy to dismiss, why she’d hand people a reason to underestimate her talent and her power. I didn’t get it. And then I did. She wasn’t performing for the room. She was living her own right to be, and she was the first woman I ever watched correct someone simply by demonstrating it: I’m not doing this for you. I’m doing it for me.
That permission didn’t stay in my closet. The more I let myself be fully here, the less willing I became to keep my circle small — and the more I wanted to open it to the ones who weren’t dressed like me.
When I put a rainbow on my website — all are welcome — a few clients left and told me plainly why. I thought I was weighing it: the income against the principle, the quiet arithmetic of a small business. The weighing took about a second. The loss of income is nowhere near the loss of integrity — I knew it before I’d finished reading the message. It wasn’t strategy. It was just true, and true doesn’t take long. Afterwards I called it a choice. It hadn’t felt like one.
Dolly knew that arithmetic. If you want the rainbow, she said, you’ve got to put up with the rain. In 2023 she sent a bejewelled, signed guitar to a drag performer in Texas who’d been testifying against the state’s anti-drag laws. Her own Christian fans had been criticizing her support for years, and she never once softened. We’re not God, she liked to say. We’re not judges. We’re supposed to love one another.
One morning, a text from dear friends — she’s gone— their daughter. I got dressed slowly, unsteadily, not knowing how a person shows up inside a grief she doesn’t understand. I stood at their front door with my nose inches from the wood. Something clawed at the inside of me and made my scalp go sticky.
Then the door swung open, and it seemed to suck the breath straight out of me. I panicked — how to arrange my face, my hands. Should I have brought something? Should I have readied some words? And then there was nothing to arrange and nothing to say. Complete and utter silence.
I remembered her as a toddler, doe-eyed. I still don’t know how someone with all that potential could be so afraid of life.
I don’t have the lesson for this one. I’ve learned that grief can’t be outrun — that it’ll get dressed up in rhinestones and come along with you, that it’ll slip into the hot bath and sit in the warm water beside you, that it is probably the origin of the next song. But the question underneath it, the real one, stays open. Dolly buried her husband of nearly sixty years and kept showing up — to Dollywood, to the Imagination Library, to the work she said kept her “healin’.” Her grief became the next song. Mine is still just grief. I’m still in the bath with it.
The last thing I built, I built on instinct. Something for women over fifty. I called it Wise Women — a place to hold their voices. I watch it happen in the room: the electricity catches, our experiences start to knit together, and in the same hour we are laughing and sitting in complete silence. Eyes meet across the circle and telegraph the oldest message there is — me too. A hand goes to a chest when a heart starts beating too fast, that sure sign the body already knows this story, has lived it before. We don’t reduce any of it to a single power statement. We let it stay what it is: a cloth woven from a true thread of every woman there. And somewhere in it we realize we have been rewriting the rules all along — we just never gave ourselves permission to call it that.
This work asks me to stay present and to keep mining my own questions, out loud, in front of people. It’s not easy, it’s not pretty, and it’s not removed. It’s the same thing I now see Dolly did in every song she wrote and every way she put herself into the world. Some mornings I wonder whether I’m even up to the task. I still don’t know. I’m doing it anyway.
Here is what undoes me. My clients reach for an image of the women who came before them — some foremother whose strength they can stand on — and their hands close on nothing. They tell me they feel unseen. That there’s no room for them, that their voices get lost, that the world has stopped paying attention.
Part of me agrees. It is hard to see what’s right in front of us when it’s dressed differently than we expected. And part of me — most of me — goes hot behind a face I hold still: why aren’t you using your voice? Dolly never asked permission. She said what she wanted, and when the old platforms didn’t fit her, she built her own to match her voice. I know that frustration intimately, because I have mostly aimed it at myself. My own voice is only emerging now, off-key half the time, reaching for notes it can’t quite hold. But every time I say the thing to a client, I hear myself saying it to me.
Because she was right there. On the cassette player on my kitchen counter. On every radio, in every kitchen, for as long as I’d been alive. We just filed her under rhinestones and let her teach us anyway, without ever once calling her a teacher.
We stopped counting the suits and started counting rhinestones. Once I couldn’t find the real woman because she wasn’t dressed seriously enough. Now we can’t find the wise one because she’s dressed too bright to take seriously.
Now that she’s gone, we have every word for her. Legend. Icon. National treasure. Every word except the one that was true all along: she was a wise woman, and we were being taught. The absence my clients grieve was never quite real. Which raises the harder question — how many others are standing in plain sight right now, guiding us, while we swear there is no one?
We are the ones who didn’t see them.
I keep fighting the idea that I should toughen up, grow a thicker skin. Even if that’s true — I would rather stay heart open. Gentle. Still believing in beauty. Still holding out for love and forgiveness. Still looking for the ones nobody thought to look for.
It’s certainly a choice.
Tania Carriere believes the most radical thing a person can do is stay soft in a world that will harden them if they let it. She is a writer, life coach, retreat leader, and TEDx speaker living between Canada, France, and Baja. advivumjourneys.ca