What Dolly Knows About Not Performing
With Dolly Parton turning 80 this week, I've been thinking about what I admire most about her. Not the accolades or the longevity, though those are remarkable, but the way she has evolved over time without losing her center. As a society, we tend to frame our own evolution as growth, while labeling other people's as inconsistency or flip-flopping. Dolly offers something different. She has adapted, expanded, and responded to the world as it is, while remaining unmistakably herself. That kind of coherence doesn't resist change. It gives change a place to land.
I'm not the same person I was eight or ten years ago. I don’t think many of us are. Some of that change came from experience. Some of it came from loss. But a meaningful part of it came from clarity. From learning what I'm willing to stand for, and what I no longer need to perform my way into. Growing into myself hasn't been about becoming harder or louder. If anything, it's come through softening. Through trusting myself enough to respond rather than brace. Through letting go of the need to be understood by everyone in order to feel grounded.
My mom has a phrase I've come to appreciate more with time: "I've thrown my give-a-shit away." What she means isn't that she's stopped caring. It's that she's stopped performing care in places where it isn't returned. I still want to be liked. But I no longer need universal approval to feel steady in who I am. There's a quiet kind of peace that comes from no longer performing yourself into belonging, even when that shift creates friction. Because it does. Not everyone is comfortable when you stop trying as hard to fit the shape they'd grown used to.
This dynamic shows up in our work lives too. How many of us are still performing enthusiasm we don't feel, or agreement we don't actually have, because that's what gets rewarded? We nod in meetings when we have questions. We soften our concerns to avoid being seen as difficult. We mirror energy we don't have because the culture doesn't make room for anything else. In the moment, it feels like strategy, like you're being professional, being a team player, managing your reputation. But over time, it becomes a tax you're paying just to stay in the room.
That's where exhaustion comes from. Not from the work itself, but from the constant recalibration of how much of yourself you can safely show. And it's why trust in teams never really deepens. When everyone is performing alignment, no one knows what anyone actually thinks. The work might get done, but the relationships stay transactional. You lose the dissent that makes ideas sharper. You lose the honesty that builds real collaboration. And often, you lose the people who were good at the work but couldn't sustain the performance.
What shifts when you stop? It's not always comfortable. Some people are unsettled when you quit performing the version of yourself they found predictable. But something else becomes possible too. Real conversations start to happen. Someone else might feel permission to stop performing. The work often gets better because people say what they actually think. And you get to find out who still wants to work with you when you're not trying so hard to be easy.
I'm still learning how to navigate this. When to stop performing, when the friction is worth it, when clarity matters more than being liked. What I admire most about Dolly isn't her confidence so much as her clarity. The confidence feels like a byproduct. Something that comes from living long enough in alignment that you stop second-guessing yourself in public. I've spent much of my life searching for what it means to be authentically me, and what I'm learning now is that authenticity isn't loud or declarative. It's rooted. The trust in who I am has started to take hold. And while the tension is still there, I feel more myself — and less performative — than I ever have.
What would it feel like to stop performing in one place where you're still trying to fit in?
