“Hey Gen X Caregiver, Are You OK?” A Q&A with Gray Monster’s Kim Elliott

Kim Elliott is the founder of Gray Monster, a community and newsletter for Gen Xers caring for their parents. What started as a side project — written between time zones, in the margins of a demanding day job — has grown into a resource that reaches tens of thousands of readers who feel, perhaps for the first time, like someone finally gets it. We sat down with Kim to talk about what caregivers are struggling with and why therapy can be a lifeline when they need it most.

Finding Gray Monster, a newsletter that’s equal parts funny, compassionate, and practical, can feel like discovering an oasis after years in the desert. What do you think it's giving people that they weren't getting before?

I think it's just permission to hold all of it at once, the love and the frustration and the grief and the anger. You can love your parent, genuinely want to do this for them, and also find it incredibly hard and isolating and exhausting. All of those things can be true at the same time, and that's okay.

What strikes me, looking back on my own experience caring for my father-in-law and my mom, is that no one ever asked how I was doing. Not a single medical professional. Nobody in the system said, "Hey, caregiver, are you OK? Are you looking out for yourself? Do you need to talk to someone?" You are the most essential part of the caregiving equation, and somehow also the most overlooked.

Is that what pushed you toward starting Gray Monster — this sense that caregivers were invisible in their own story?

That's exactly it. And one of the core beliefs I built Gray Monster around is what I call "conversation before crisis." A lot of what makes caregiving so destabilizing is that we never talk about any of it until we're in the middle of it. We don't talk about what our parents want as they age. We don't talk about what we need. And then something happens, whether it’s a fall, a diagnosis, or a sudden decline, and then we're scrambling.

The details of my experience are specific to me and my family, but the friction points, the systems we all have to navigate, the fear, the role reversal —those aren't unique at all. What I hear from thousands of caregivers is that they're up against the same things, just with different names and different diseases.

Let's talk about therapy specifically. A lot of caregivers might hear "you should try therapy" and think: one more thing, one more hour, one more expense I don't have. What would you say to that person?

I'd tell them it's okay to think about themselves. And if that's hard, if you truly can't prioritize yourself right now, think about your kids. Think about your spouse. Think about your friends, who are probably watching helplessly from the sidelines because they don't know what to say. Think about the person you're caring for, and whether the version of you that's running on empty is the caregiver they deserve.

The thing about therapy that I don't think gets said enough is that it’s incredibly practical. A good therapist helps you understand your own triggers: what sends you into a spiral, what you need to outsource, what you need to let your parent handle even when you're tempted to jump in and fix it. That self-knowledge makes you a better caregiver.

You went back to therapy yourself during the hardest stretch of caregiving. What did it actually do for you?

I'd been seeing someone on and off for a while before everything came crashing together at once — my father-in-law's decline, my mother's transplant, COVID, all of it. What I kept coming back to was that therapy gave me a place where everything was allowed to be true. I didn't have to be okay. I didn't have to have answers. I could just say, "This is what's happening," and have someone hear it and help me process it.

What about older adults themselves — the Boomers being cared for? Is there any success in getting them to try therapy?

More than you'd expect, actually. One of the things I've come to love about Gray Monster is that it has an unexpected secondary reader in the self-aware Boomer. Often, this Boomer has watched their own parent age without any real support or conversation and is determined to do it differently. They'll write to me and say, "I send this to my kids every week because I don't know how to have this conversation with them, but maybe they'll read it and understand."

What I've noticed is that the Boomers most open to this kind of reflection — including therapy, including family conversations — are the ones who saw how hard it was to care for a parent from the Silent Generation, where talking about any of this was simply not done. They watched the damage that silence caused, and they want something different. If that means sitting in a therapist's office with their adult child and working through something that happened thirty years ago, a lot of them are genuinely willing to do that. Not all of them. But more than people think.

You mention grief a lot when you talk about caregiving. But people usually associate grief with death. What do you mean when you say caregiving is full of grief?

Caregiving is grief that starts long before anyone dies. There's the grief of the role reversal, that moment you realize you're now the parent in some meaningful way. There's the grief of watching someone you love become someone you don't quite recognize. And underneath all of it, there's this ache for the person they used to be. You still want your mom to be your mom. You still want to call your dad for advice. That doesn't go away just because the roles have shifted.

When a parent has dementia, whether it’s Alzheimer's, FTD, or any form, that grief is extended over years. It's a slow erosion. And when you're the primary caregiver, it wears you down in ways that are really hard to describe to someone who hasn't been through it. One moment you're trying to help your parent shower for the first time in a week, and the next they say something that cuts right through you. That kind of psychological weight is exactly what therapy is built for.

And caregivers often feel like they can't talk about that grief with the people around them.

Especially if you're one of the first in your friend group to go through it. I was. And nobody understood — not because they didn't care, but because they genuinely couldn't relate. They didn't know what to say, so they said nothing. And you take an experience that's already isolating and make it even more so.

One of the underrated gifts a therapist gives you is that they've seen this before. You don't have to explain why it's hard. You don't have to justify feeling the way you feel. Someone who specializes in caregiving or grief already knows and knows how to help you.

For someone who's in the middle of it right now and doesn't know where to start, what would you suggest they do?

For one, take the last 90 seconds of your parent's next doctor's appointment and ask “What support exists for me?” There are more programs being created to support family caregivers than most people realize, because the healthcare system is starting to understand it's a real crisis. Someone will probably point you to a list of resources, and that's a start.

Ask your employer what's available too. More and more companies are recognizing that keeping caregivers in the workforce means supporting them, not just ignoring what they're carrying.

And seriously consider therapy. If weekly therapy feels like too big a leap, just think about going once. One hour to let it all out. To not feel so alone. To have someone actually hear what you're living through.

Is there anything you wish you'd known at the beginning of your caregiving experience that you'd want to pass on?

I'd tell people to start therapy before they think they need it. Not because something terrible is necessarily coming, but because caregiving almost always ends in loss. And when it does — when you've given years of yourself to this person and they're gone — you don't want to be starting from zero in terms of your own support system. Protect your future self. Build that relationship now, so when the grief really comes, you're not carrying it alone.

Caregiving is one of the most meaningful things you can do for another person. It's also one of the most quietly devastating. Both of those things are true. And you deserve support for all of it.