The Gift of Being Fully Human

There is something about Dolly Parton that I keep returning to. I've thought about her on and off for years, long before the recent wave of public mourning, and it isn't really the music that pulls me back. Or the career. It's something harder to name. Her humanity, I guess. Or maybe her ability to remain genuinely, stubbornly human in a world that seems increasingly determined to sort us into categories before we've even opened our mouths.

I keep going back to her because I think I'm trying to remember something. And somehow, thinking about her helps me remember it.

What struck me most was how hard she was to pin down. She didn't seem particularly interested in the ideological camps that have become almost mandatory if you want to be taken seriously in public life. You didn't have to figure out which side she was on before you were allowed to appreciate her. You didn't have to place her.

And that was the gift, I think. The possibility that you could have convictions without being consumed by them. That you could care about something fiercely without needing the person who disagreed with you to be evil. She showed, in her own imperfect and playful way, that kindness wasn't the same as weakness. That you could be generous without performing your generosity for an audience.

That's rare. And the reason it hits people so hard isn't because it was new. It's because we recognize it. Somewhere in us, we remember that this is possible.

Maybe that's what we are really mourning when someone like Dolly dies. Not simply the loss of a person, but the loss of a living example of something we still need.

I've spent a lot of my life thinking about leadership. What makes someone worth following. Where real influence comes from. And I keep coming back to Dolly, which probably says something about what I think leadership actually is.

Hers didn't start with power. It started with people. With a genuine affection for being alive and for the specific, unglamorous people around her. She led without constantly announcing that she was leading. You just noticed, after the fact, that things had shifted around her. That something had been made possible that wasn't possible before.

And she didn't seem to see life as something she had to accomplish alone. So much of what she created was collaborative. A song isn't a song until someone else hears it. Same with the Imagination Library—those books are just paper until a kid pulls one off a shelf and disappears into it for an afternoon. Her work created openings for other people to participate.

That feels essential to me. Because leadership isn't simply what we do ourselves. It's also what becomes possible around us because of the way we show up.

She could be one of the most famous people in the world and still get genuinely tickled by a bad pun at a gas station. She could be wealthy and still understand that money and abundance aren't the same thing. She could walk into almost any room and belong there without needing to own it. That's a kind of freedom most of us haven't figured out yet.

There's a difference between conformity and belonging that we've lost track of, and Dolly understood it. Conformity says: trim yourself down. Quiet the parts that don't fit. Earn your place by becoming less. Belonging says: bring who you are. The contradictions. The unfinished parts.

Dolly wasn't a conformist. Her life was extravagantly, undeniably hers. Sequins and scripture, boardroom instincts and a genuine delight in gossiping with strangers, Appalachian roots and a pop sensibility that crossed every border. She never seemed to need those things to resolve into a single coherent brand before she walked into a room.

I think about that a lot because I've spent years trying to figure out which group I belonged to. Which version of myself would be accepted. What to emphasize, what to hide. And I suspect that's the wrong question entirely. Belonging doesn't begin with finding the right tribe. It begins when you stop leaving yourself at the door. When you can say: this is who I am, I'm still figuring it out, I'm probably going to change, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise just to be let in.

That's a terrifying kind of freedom. And she seemed to understand it.

There's another part of her legacy that feels especially meaningful to me now. She spent her life supporting people and causes rooted in a very simple idea: people matter. Children matter. Their humanity isn't something they have to earn or justify.

It just is.

Love thy neighbor. Four words. And yet we've gotten remarkably creative about finding reasons to skip certain neighbors. We've turned human beings into categories. People who deserve help and people who should have known better. People like us and people who need to be explained, contained, managed.

I catch myself doing this. Last month I read a story about a woman in a rural town making a decision I disagreed with politically, and my first thought wasn't curiosity. It was oh, one of those people. A box. A label. A reason not to wonder what her life actually looks like from the inside. Sorting feels safer than meeting someone. If I can put you in a box, I don't have to risk being changed by you. I don't have to admit that your life is as real and fragile and bewildering as mine.

Dolly spent much of her life quietly refusing to play that game. Not by pretending differences weren't real. She had opinions. She said them. But she seemed to keep remembering that the person across from her was still a person. Still carrying something she couldn't see.

In a world that runs so easily on dehumanization, that's radical.

Then there's the ego thing. Or the lack of it. Dolly had a huge public persona—the hair, the nails, the self-deprecating jokes about how much she'd spent on looking like herself. She played with it, exaggerated it, made it part of the art. She knew it was a construction, and she was perfectly comfortable letting us know that she knew.

But underneath all of that, there was a groundedness. A sense that she knew who she was without needing the world to keep confirming it. There's a big difference between knowing who you are and needing to be seen as special. The first can set you free. The second turns every conversation into an audition.

She never needed us to become Dolly. She somehow made it feel possible to become more fully ourselves. Watching someone be so unapologetically, weirdly, completely herself gave other people a little permission to do the same.

This may be the part I keep thinking about most. She never seemed finished. Even as she aged, even when things didn't go as planned. There was still curiosity. Still a willingness to try something that might not work. In a 2020 interview, she talked about wanting to write a gospel album and a rock record in the same year, and she said it the way someone talks about what they're having for dinner—lightly, with genuine pleasure, as though the next thing was obvious and inevitable and fun.

What else? I think that question is one of the great signs of a life still being lived.

Somewhere along the way, a lot of us begin answering that question with conclusions instead. I've done this. We accumulate experiences. Some beautiful, some that hurt us deeply. We make mistakes, hurt people, get misunderstood. And eventually, if we're not careful, we start living more and more from what has already happened than from what is still possible. We live in our stories. In our disappointments. In everything we already know.

I've watched this happen in myself. Sometimes we stop participating in life before life actually stops. We become more certain, more guarded, more attached to our conclusions. We keep people at a distance without realizing we're doing it.

And maybe that's not really about age. It's about participation. We can get older without continuing to participate in the becoming of our lives. We can become so identified with what we've experienced that we stop allowing ourselves to be surprised.

We all know when we're around someone open to life. And we know when we're around someone who has already decided that life is mostly disappointing. You can feel the difference. Not because something mystical is happening, but because the way someone shows up changes what becomes possible in the space between people. Energy can invite, or it can quietly close a door.

Dolly kept choosing the open door. And that choice matters.

This doesn't mean pretending that life doesn't hurt. It doesn't mean ignoring trauma, grief, loss, injustice, or the things we've done that we wish we hadn't. Quite the opposite. The invitation is to meet all of it honestly and then ask what we're going to do with it.

Because our circumstances are real. The things that happened to us are real. But they don't have to become the final author of how we show up. There is a kind of vibrancy available to us that isn't dependent upon everything going right. Not because the darkness wasn't real. Because we chose not to become the darkness.

We can apologize. We can begin again. Not once—again and again.

That, to me, is freedom. Not freedom from our circumstances. Freedom in how we meet them. Freedom to become untethered from the belief that what happened to us must determine what happens next.

Dolly didn't wait for perfect circumstances before she participated in life. She participated in life.

So when I think about what she actually gave us—and I mean gave, freely, without invoice—I don't think the biggest gift was a song, or a business, or even the Imagination Library, though God bless it. Those things matter. They're real. But underneath them is something simpler.

A way of meeting the world. And I don't think that belongs to her. That's the beautiful part. She didn't invent generosity or play or curiosity. She embodied them. Made them visible. And now she is gone. But what she embodied doesn't have to disappear with her. We can inherit it. Not as a possession. As a choice.

Someone can encounter us and feel a little more possibility because of how we showed up. Someone can feel less alone. Maybe that is Dolly's truest legacy. And if we choose, it can be ours too.

So the invitation isn't to admire her from a distance. Not to put her on a shelf. Not to turn her into a symbol for a kindness we admire but don't actually practice when we're irritated and late.

The harder, quieter question is: What is it that I loved in her that is already alive in me? And what would happen if I let more of it out?

Not a better version of someone else. Not a more impressive version. Just more honestly, more fully, me. The part that still wants to play. The part that can waste an afternoon on something that doesn't produce anything. The part that sees a stranger and registers person before category. The part that can say I don't know, or I was wrong, or I've changed my mind, without feeling like I've lost myself.

The part that can look at what has happened—good or bad—and still ask: what else is possible?

Underneath all the noise and all the identities and all the arguments, we are not nearly as different as we've been told. Most of us just want someone to notice we're in the room. To not have to perform our way into being loved.

Maybe that's what Dolly left us. Not a philosophy. Not a platform. A way of being human. A reminder that we don't have to harden. We don't have to pretend the person beside us isn't our neighbor.

Dolly died.

But something of what she embodied remains available to us. In the way we treat the person in front of us. In whether we choose curiosity over certainty. In whether we keep participating or quietly resign.

That part is still here. It was never really hers. It was always ours. Maybe she simply had the courage and the humor and the heart to make it visible.

And now the question belongs to us. Will we let the circumstances of our lives define the energy we bring into the world? Or will we choose, again and again, to bring something different? Something that makes a little more room for other people to be fully human too.

The best way to honor her isn't to hold on to her. It's to let something move through us. To carry it into the next conversation, the next disagreement, the next uncertain moment. To keep becoming. Not perfectly. Just willingly.

With whoever is in front of me. With myself. With whatever comes next.

What else?