Some Thoughts on Illness, Dolly Parton, and Being Fine

Lynn Melnick

No medical professional outside of therapy—not my gastroenterologist, not my pulmonologist, not my rheumatologist, not my gynecologist, not my ob-gyn before or after delivering my babies, not even my extremely engaged and thorough internist—had ever asked me about my trauma history until I filled out intake forms for acupuncture in brownstone Brooklyn during the bleak pandemic summer of 2020. In retrospect, it seems absurd, as so many of my ailments stem from the fallout of a history of violence, but, as always, I’d long learned to hide those dark aspects and just smile and say, nope, no history of diabetes, nor of thyroid issues, nor of high cholesterol. I no longer smoke, I rarely drink. I’m OK. I’m OK!

I was raped as a child, again as a teen, and later I lived with a difficult man for several years. I write poems and have just written a memoir about much of this, but I don’t bring it up often otherwise, even to people I love, so certainly not with doctors. Still, my body holds all of it, directly and indirectly.

When I saw that question—Is there a history of trauma you’d like to tell us about? (car accidents, abuse, medical events, etc.)—on the acupuncturist’s intake form, I gasped. For real, like out loud. I was that surprised and, to be honest, relieved.

The summer prior I’d been in Ohio for my cousin’s wedding when a flare-up of my stomach disorder occurred, a flare-up worse than any I’d experienced, and I found myself in a suburban ER thinking maybe it was appendicitis or something to do with my gallbladder. It was not. I was fine. Fine! I left and then I came back the next day, still in pain. I’d just come off a year and a half of promoting my recent book of poems which was all about my history as the victim of violence and rape culture. I hadn’t been able to turn down any event for fear I’d seem ungrateful and because of that nagging part of me that defines my worth in busyness. And so, I traveled from New York to Massachusetts and Vermont and Maine and North Carolina and Florida and Iowa and Illinois and Indiana and California and Oregon and maybe others that slip my mind, it was a blur. I was lucky. On social media, it probably looked very exciting, but my body was falling apart and still I couldn’t stop going and going.

When I began to work on my memoir—which is also a love song to the one and only Dolly Parton—I wondered what she and I had in common, coming from such different backgrounds and generations. She grew up in poverty in post–World War II rural Tennessee learning bluegrass music and church music from her mother; I grew up Jewish and middle class in Los Angeles during the glam metal years of the 1980s. Why am I so drawn to this icon? The music, of course, is almost unfathomably transcendent and moving, but I learned as I wrote that there is something about Dolly’s drive that deeply speaks to me, her relentless go-go-go that is both a consequence and a benefit of hardship and capitalism and the myth of bootstraps that pull you up.

“At the heart of capitalism is the idea of productivity,” Gillian Giles writes on The Body Is Not an Apology blog. “Unfortunately, shame, stigma and isolation are all too common experiences for those unable to keep up with the expectations of productivity. From a young age we are taught that our bodies and our purpose is to produce within effective normative means. That in order to be something of worth, we must prove our productivity.” I always think I’m overreacting when I feel burnout, I worry I’m being weak, and I think rest is something I shouldn’t do because as soon as I rest people will see me for what I really am: an unserious fuck-up, a ruined weakling, a damaged little kid.

In my memoir, I wrote a whole chapter about capitalism and illness and ableism—and mine and Dolly’s relationship to all of this. I took it out in revision because of space constraints and other fussy things like flow and pace. But capitalist, ableist ideas of worth and productivity have been stamped into my soul since I was a kid and had to go to school when I was sick, stamped into my DNA since my parents were kids and had to do the same, stamped since my Jewish ancestors had to keep moving, keep proving their worth in order to live. And to be fair to capitalism, I also don’t want to waste any opportunities I’ve had, they all seem like rare gifts. I mean, I got to write a whole book about my life and how Dolly Parton gets me through it! I’m supposed to just… rest?

People say that, in person, I’m bubbly. I laugh easily, I’m enthusiastic about life, I’m effusive with my affection. I do, like Dolly, possess an optimism that defies some of my experiences. I spend my days immersed in Dolly Parton and parenting and getting the best photo of my cats; if you don’t know me well, you would likely not know that until I was in my forties, I had trauma flashbacks not infrequently and that often, as I was writing my poems and my memoir and watching hours of Dolly footage from twentieth-century talk shows, I was also doubled over in extreme stomach pain.

At my second trip to the suburban Ohio ER, they gave me Toradol via IV, the only med that takes that pain away, and the attending doctor suggested I talk to my doctor about Functional Abdominal Pain Syndrome, more recently renamed Centrally Mediated Abdominal Pain Syndrome, an ailment of the stomach which causes pain when the nerves misfire. According to the International Foundation for Gastrointestinal Disorders website, “For people with CAPS, the pain can be so all-consuming that it becomes the main focus of their life. Not only does it impact quality of life, but it has a major economic impact as well.” Having nothing to do with the act of digestion, pain occurs when the body misreads normal gut sensations as pain, often debilitating pain. Of course, I went right to Google and found out more, found out that the disorder is most common in those who have suffered trauma, that there is no cure, and that many who suffer it end up unable to work or tend to other aspects of their lives amid the relentless pain.

Two gastros back in New York City told me they’d never heard of this ailment; both suggested I try more fiber, although the ability to shit normally was never my issue. Finally, a third doc confirmed the ER doctor’s hunch, adding that little could be done. “You take Xanax, right?” she said. When all else fails.

In her 1994 autobiography, Dolly talks about the violence she experienced in her youth, the crushing poverty that kept her without shoes in the warmer months and with nothing under her coat (the famous “Coat of Many Colors”) in the colder months. These experiences left her with emotional scars, sure, but also with a relentless drive to achieve, to keep pushing through. The pull to find worth in productivity feels both genetic and the result of trauma. I have spent almost four decades discounting the physical and emotional effects of rape, so I wouldn’t know how to allow myself space to heal even if I was ordered to by a physician. I want to leave a legacy that isn’t pain, and for me that’s productivity, and it’s a way to survive, but one that my political brain is at odds with, because in theory I know we are worth more than our productivity.

With the pandemic adding to the pile of earlier trauma, in the summer of 2020, my stomach pain flare-ups became crushing, and I worried I couldn’t keep up my pace. I was in the middle of writing my memoir and the work I was doing was feeding me, keeping me hopeful, making me more me, but I was also overwhelmed. I sat in the acupuncturist’s office recounting my trauma on the intake form and when we later spoke, she said, “There are things we can do to release some of that.”

In Interview magazine in 1984, Dolly tells Andy Warhol, “I was going through a period of time that the nerves and the tension and the stress were actually what got me sick. So then it was like, which came first, the chicken or the egg? I just kept getting worse and worse and then I started having stomach problems, ulcers and intestinal problems. But it was the best thing that ever happened to me. It made me really smart. When I was flat on my back, I realized that I could never retire, that I hated it, that I would never get myself in that place again.” When I finally dragged myself through image rehearsal therapy for trauma flashbacks it was because of what they were doing to my body. I wanted to love and create and celebrate and I needed my body’s help.

Acupuncture didn’t cure my stomach ailment—there is no cure—or erase trauma, but it helps a bit. It’s like each needle is an acknowledgment that I am a complete and complex person; to find that feeling is the struggle so many of us survivors are up against. So, these days, do I tell all my doctors about my trauma history? No. I need to be asked, and I haven’t otherwise been. A lifetime of secrecy doesn’t just evaporate like that. I will tell you, and my doctors, and myself I’m ok. I’m ok! I’m fine. I googled “trauma and productivity” and I found dozens of articles on how trauma decreases productivity even though, I would argue, the work of healing is the hardest, steadiest work of our lives. Trauma results in the perpetual need to be the best and most composed in the room. For me, and for Dolly, I want rest, I want us to acknowledge our worth outside of what we produce, but I don’t yet know how we get there.

Like me with writing, Dolly doesn’t share her struggles too easily outside of her songs. If you only know her social media, it’s all new collaborations and inspirational sayings and perfume sales and throwback photos. Speaking at a “Whole Health Includes Mental Health” event in 2021, Dolly told the virtual audience, after reminding them that it’s okay to struggle, “I’m often told I look so happy, but to be honest—that’s the Botox. Well, not all of it, but some of it, anyway!” I never recognize myself in Dolly more than when she’s downplaying her struggle while at the same time embodying the act of survival.

Lynn Melnick is the author of the poetry collections Refusenik (2022), Landscape with Sex and Violence (2017), and If I Should Say I Have Hope (2012), all with YesYes Books, and the coeditor of Please Excuse This Poem: 100 Poets for the Next Generation (Viking, 2015). I’ve Had to Think Up a Way to Survive: On Trauma, Persistence, and Dolly Parton is forthcoming from University of Texas Press in October 2022.