09/10/2026
“If you allow yourself to get old, you will.” 💖
— Dolly Parton
After the world lost Dolly, I went down a Dolly rabbit hole and ended up writing an email about something I couldn't stop thinking about:
She made her first-ever rock album at 77 years old.👩🏻🎤
Thirty songs. Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Elton John, Steven Tyler, Sting, Stevie Nicks, Melissa Etheridge, Sheryl Crow, Lynyrd Skynyrd…
And it became the highest-charting album of her entire career.
At 77.
Meanwhile, how many of us start telling ourselves decades earlier:
I'm getting old.
My body isn't what it used to be.
I guess this is just what happens at my age.
Aging is real.
Feeling terrible isn't automatically a requirement.
And before we chalk the exhaustion, brain fog, poor recovery, body changes or just generally not feeling like ourselves up to getting older, I think it's worth asking a better question:
Does it have to be?
Because Dolly certainly didn't shrink her life to fit some idea of what 77 was supposed to look like.
She made a freaking rock album.⚡️
And that's a pretty damn good reminder that there may be a whole lot more life available to us than we've been letting ourselves believe.
So I'm sharing the email here too. Swipe through to read. 👉
For the love of Dolly, don't count yourself out early.
You're just getting started. 💖