Dolly Parton once 'pondered' taking her own life: 'Not everybody knew what I was going through...'
Dolly Parton once thought about taking her own life as she opens up about persona struggles she went through in the 1990s.
Dolly Parton was once so low that she "pondered" taking her own life.
The 78-year-old country music legend has enjoyed decades of success but revealed that there was a time in the 1990s when a number of things had left her "wounded" and she turned to writing music as a form of therapy.
Speaking on SiriusXM, she said: “I was overweight, I was feeling bad and I was going through a business relationship and I had felt betrayed. It was one of those perfect storms. I wasn’t going to commit suicide, but I pondered.
"I never went to a therapist, just went to my guitar, started writing songs. My music is my best therapy. Not everybody knew what I was going through, I was just working wounded.
"You don’t stop living just because you have a broken heart or a broken spirit. You’ve still got jobs to do.”
But the ‘Jolene' hitmaker reasoned that "almost everybody" has probably endued the same sort of mental struggle she did at some point in their lives and jokingly compared her own life to rocky road ice cream as opposed to vanilla.
She said: "I bet nearly everybody has been in the dumps that I’ve had.
“I always said I’d rather be rocky road than vanilla."
The ‘9 to 5' star - who has been married to Carl Thomas Dean since 1966 - previously explained how she started overeating as a source of comfort when she reached middle age and recalled putting her body through immense "strain" as she tried fad diet after fad diet.
Writing in her 2017 memoir 'Dolly on 'Dolly, she said: "Suddenly I was a middle-aged woman. I went through a dark time, until I made myself snap out of it. On top of being medicated, Dietin' Dolly would go on liquid protein, Scarsdale, Atkins, the water diet, then I'd binge, diet, gain, start all over again. Eventually my system wouldn't work anymore. My body couldn't hold up under that strain. Overeating is as much a sickness as drugs or alcohol."
