To put it bluntly, 2026 has been shitty. Each month has brought blow after blow, which has had me wonder how much more “rolling with the punches” one can do. One can only be so strong, so resilient and carry the heaviness of what’s happened this year for so long before they’re sent away to live alone on a cliff by the sea because they can’t handle life anymore, if anyone is wondering how I’m doing.
This year, in addition to experiencing the continued decline of my mom’s health due to MSA, the college I work for announced it’s closing next summer and because of that my work has taken a 180-degree turn. Two of my closest friends are no longer speaking to me and left me completely gutted. My mom’s mom passed away from dementia. After experiencing abnormal bleeding during my period, expelling my IUD, a pelvic and transvaginal ultrasound, as well as a pelvic MRI, doctors found five fibroids in my uterine walls. At the end of May, I tore my meniscus in my knee (again) and at the end of July, I had surgery (again) to fix the tear. Not to mention all of this wildly motions in circles in reference to the dumpster fire that is the United States of America in 2026.
Luckily, I increased my antidepressant dosage based on my psychiatrist’s suggestion.
It’s been a year
Safe to say, it’s obviously been a year, which is why it’s taken so long to write about anything. Every time I would sit down and write, before I could publish anything, another punch would come out of nowhere and knock me off my feet. It’s probably taken me longer to process all the emotions that has come with everything I mentioned above. You know the usual: grief, sadness, loneliness, and fear. There was something else though, something unfamiliar. I was beginning to physically feel something that wasn’t anxiety, because that I’m familiar with. Whatever it was, had been bubbling under the surface for some time, especially around the effects of my mom’s disease in the last year. Not just the physical effects on her, but how people have treated her. Those feelings continued to compound, brick by brick: family dynamics, friends not communicating and showing up for me, work being a dumpster fire, my health…the list goes on.
What is this feeling?
The unfamiliar and unexpected emotion? Anger. You’re probably thinking to yourself, No duh, Lauren, anger is one of the stages of grief (and anticipatory grief). And you know what? You’re not wrong. I can easily say I’ve been angry before–who hasn’t, but this version of anger? I was unfamiliar with this version of anger.
In her book, Atlas of the Heart, Brené Brown says this about anger, “Anger is a catalyst…It’s an emotion that we need to transform into something life-giving: courage, love, change, compassion, justice. Or sometimes anger can mask a far more difficult emotion like grief, regret, or shame, and we need to use it to dig into what we’re really feeling. Either way, anger is a powerful catalyst but a life-sucking companion.”
A few months ago, I was talking with a friend about our grief. He knows it well–his 18-month-old daughter unexpectedly passed away a couple years ago. I asked him if there was anything he wished he would’ve done then or differently as he now understands grief more. He said, “I wish I let my anger out more, instead of holding it in.” His response surprised me and it resonated with me.
I knew that while a lot of the anger I was feeling had to do with my mom’s declining health, at the time, I couldn’t quite put my finger on why I felt so angry. There had to be more, I just hadn’t unearthed it. So I spent time digging into why I was feeling so angry.
The messy truth
What I found wasn’t pretty. It was messy. Honestly, I’m still working through the layers of all of this. It’s difficult to write about because I still care and I want to be fair about how I talk about what I discovered. I spent time holding a mirror up to myself asking, “Am I the problem?” I spent time in my head, running through different interactions, responses, situations I could identify were contributing to my anger. I spent time writing and asking myself, “Am I wrong for feeling this way about this [fill in the blank]?” It was/is uncomfortable sitting and holding onto anger. It was/is exhausting sitting and holding onto anger. It hurt to sit and hold onto anger, but I needed to get to the truth. I hadn’t sat with this version anger long enough. I needed to know how to name it, to understand it and understand what was underneath it.
I found one of the biggest roots of my anger stems from how people I love(d), have treated me in the last year–how consideration, care and understanding weren’t reciprocated when I needed it most. They don’t tell you that people will exit your life because you can’t give to them anymore when you are deep in [anticipatory] grief. Or maybe they do, but you don’t believe it because there’s no way the people you’ve surrounded yourself with could be that selfish. One of the other roots of my anger, is obviously, MSA–what it’s doing to my mom and how it’s affecting our family.
The hard stuff that needs to be said
It’s hard to be losing so many parts of my mom right in front of my eyes and feeling like I’m not doing enough to help her. It’s hard to learn, accept, and get used to a new version of her we get, only to grieve that version we end up losing in a week or a month, because the disease continues progress. It’s hard to not be able to plan too far into the future and explain to people it’s because my mom might take a turn for the worse, or you know, die. It’s hard to wrap my head around the reality that we don’t get good days with her, it’s just hours now. It’s hard to know how to support my dad, as he’s become her full-time caregiver, and has basically lost his lifelong partner. It’s hard to accept that my mom–the one who made me homemade biscuits and gravy, the one who I would try to chase up a Colorado mountain (and fail miserably), the one who was always having people over, the one who we would be waiting for in the car in the church parking lot because she couldn’t stop talking, the one who I could share clothes with because we were around the same height, weight, and size, the one who made sure our family was connected by planning new experiences for us, the one who gave the best advice and tough love when you needed it–most of that person is essentially gone.
It’s hard enough to watch MSA take over your mom’s body, her personality, her brain, and her independence, knowing she’s going to die–that grief is different. It’s constant, continuous, and it takes so much of my energy to work through it all. And I’m choosing to be in these moments now. To not stuff it down, not deal with it, and wait for later. So while I’m doing all of that, no one told me I’d have to grieve the loss of people who I thought understood me and would have the most grace for me during this season of my life. Nor did I expect to have to work through all the anticipatory grief in relation to my job.
So it’s not a wonder some of the emotions I found underneath my anger were hurt, resentment, and grief. And I was full of rage.
Rage, is a quiet thing.
Ooh, you think that you’ve tamed it
But it’s just laying in waitRage, is it in our veins?
Feel it in my face when
When I least expect it-Simmer by Hayley Williams
Once I was able to identify what was lying underneath my anger, I knew I needed to do something about it. I wasn’t going to let all of these emotions just simmer. But this time, I knew I needed more than to just talk about the hurt, the anger, the grief, the rage. One day, I remembered someone from one of my support groups I attend suggested we should plan an outing for us to go to a smash room. It didn’t end up working out with our schedules at the time, but I thought this might be a way for me to do something more for myself. So I booked a session at a local place.
Hulk Smash
Reading through the reviews of the experience, people noted you could play your own music. As you can assume, I crafted the perfect playlist. My weapon of choice was a metal bat. I donned gloves, protective eyewear, a hard hat and quickly went through the safety orientation. For 45 minutes I let my anger out.
I beat the shit out of a keyboard for when Sage forgot my birthday this year. And I destroyed a printer for when Troy decided to distance himself from me because I said I didn’t have capacity to show up for him and spend more time with his partner and the year worth of unknown radio silence. I broke glass bottles for my feelings of frustration of being the family manager and the inequity of my experience in comparison to my brother’s experience caregiving for my mom.
I smashed another keyboard for the way I have kept fighting for myself when I have almost nothing left to give. I destroyed an already massacred printer for the loneliness I have felt in being single going through this and accepting I’ll most likely be single for a long time because asking a man to have some sort of emotional intelligence and hold this uncomfortable space of anticipatory grief feels impossible. I swung on the tire in front of me for all the events and fun moments I missed out on because I couldn’t get myself out of my head, let alone out of the house to spend time with friends after spending weeks taking care of my mom and helping around the house. I smashed the last printer because I’m so angry I’m having to watch this disease slowly take my mom–someone I wish I had more time with to experience the rest of my life that she’ll miss out on and soon, I’ll be someone who had a mom. I finished my session by shattering all the glass bottles I paid extra for because of the struggle of feeling like I’m putting my life on hold to experience and be as present as possible for this horrible and life-changing thing.
The aftermath
A few minutes before my time was up, I sipped a Gatorade I brought with me (because I’m smart). It took a few minutes for me to catch my breath and let my heart rate slow down. I felt a wide-range of emotions while smashing the shit out of everything and it felt good. As I exited the room, I was a hot mess of sweat, snot, and tears. I returned the metal bat to the box of weapons. I disinfected the hard hat and returned it to the hook I took it off of earlier. I took my gloves off to disinfect them, only to discover I had a couple gnarly blisters on my hands where I held the bat–the gloves did the bare minimum to protect my hands. Guess I was leaving with a couple battle scars.
As I walked out of the building, I felt lighter. It was one of the most cathartic things I have done for myself as I’ve been working through this grief.
There’s such a stigma around Black women being angry or feeling anger. As one myself, there’s a lot to be angry about and often, we’re not given the courtesy to express our anger at all. When we hold emotions in, especially an emotion like anger, we are doing ourselves a disservice. It can even lead to significant health problems down the line. As a society, we need to talk more about the healing ways to feel and express an emotion like anger. We cannot avoid the emotion, even if it’s uncomfortable or difficult to understand. Anger is messy. Anger is multi-faceted. Anger is like an iceberg, there’s so much more underneath than what we can see on the surface. Anger is worth understanding and figuring out.
While 2026 has been shit to me, it has also opened the door for me to begin to have a healthier understanding and relationship with anger. I’m accepting that life is, indeed, unfair. That I’m grateful to care for my mom and at the same time, I don’t want to. I just want to be her daughter. Taking care of her is a gift. It’s an opportunity to love her in a rare and unexpected way. I’m accepting that it is okay to feel anger, it’s actually really healthy. I’m accepting I can be grateful for the time I had with certain people I expected to be in my life forever and I’m accepting I can still feel some type of way about their absence. Lastly, I’m accepting the effects of this disease my mom has, has forever changed me and I’ll never be the same.
Lauren Brooks 