Janis Joplin would’ve been seventy-three years old this year. Doesn’t that blow your mind?

This October will mark the forty-sixth anniversary of Joplin’s death. She was only twenty-seven years old when she died.

Janis Joplin has been dead far longer than she was alive. In some ways, she seemed like she was a bigger-than-life sort of character. But her early death shows just how fragile she really was.

Like other music stars before and after her, Joplin died because of the effects of drugs. Her death certificate listed “acute heroin-morphine intoxication” as the cause of her death. But although the specific drugs of choice for Joplin and other entertainers might be different, her story is an all-too-familiar one.

Joplin’s reputation does not rely on her music alone. It also has a lot to do with her image. Joplin projected (and still projects) an image of a liberated, talented woman. Part of this liberated image also seems to be the freedom to have a good time, to party just as hard—if not harder—than men.

Did this raucous image help create Joplin’s downfall? Did she use large amounts of drugs to conform to this image of a hard-living rock star?

If she did, she isn’t alone. Whether they are famous or not, many people feel that they need to use alcohol or drugs to conform to certain images. It could be the behaviors that they exhibit under the influence or the fact that they use drugs and alcohol in the first place.

But to quote your second-grade teacher and many teen magazines, you can’t try to be someone entirely new. It’s hard to sustain that new image because it’s work. By focusing on creating and sustaining your new image, you risk losing what makes you uniquely you.

This isn’t to say that people shouldn’t stop trying to improve themselves. But they should try to enhance what they already have, not build themselves from scratch. Even if we need a little help sometimes, we all have value.