Dolly Parton has remembered being so down that she thought about ending her own life.
The 78-year-old country music icon has had many years of success, but she has revealed that in the 1990s, she faced difficult times that made her feel 'wounded' and 'betrayed'.
‘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,’ she said.
However, the Jolene hitmaker insisted rather than turning to a professional for help, she instead found comfort in her music.
‘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,’ she added to SiriusXM.
‘You don’t stop living just because you have a broken heart or a broken spirit. You’ve still got jobs to do.’
Dolly suggested that ‘nearly everybody’ has endured some kind of mental struggle in their life, and insisted she’d rather have some bumps in the road than a smooth ride.
‘I bet nearly everybody has been in the dumps that I’ve had,’ she said. ‘I always said I’d rather be rocky road than vanilla.’
The 9 to 5 singer – 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.
She remembered putting her body through immense ‘strain’ as she tried different fad diets during a ‘dark time’ in her life.
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.’
Meanwhile, Dolly previously insisted she has no plans to retire, and instead she’d rather ‘drop dead’ on stage during a concert.
‘I always believe that if you’ve wanted your dreams to come true and you are lucky enough to have that happen then you gotta be responsible because you’ve got to keep the dream alive,’ told Ken Bruce on Greatest Hits Radio.
‘I would never retire… I would hopefully drop dead in the middle of a song on stage someday – and hopefully one I’ve written. That’s how I hope to go.’
