Amy,
Thank you for such a thoughtful, honest response. I want you to know first and foremost that I hear how hard this is for you right now. Nothing you wrote sounds wrong, selfish, or inadequate. It sounds like someone who is overwhelmed, scared, and still choosing to stay present anyway—and that matters more than you may realize.
I'm really glad you're continuing with therapy and that you already have your next appointment scheduled. The fact that you named this as "heavy to carry" is important, because it is. You're being asked to emotionally reorient yourself while also trying to hold onto a sense of stability, and that's not something anyone does effortlessly. Therapy isn't about fixing your feelings or making them disappear; it's about giving you room to have them without becoming stuck inside them. You deserve that support just as much as Cynthia does.
I want to gently reflect something back to you. You used the words "try" and "trying" several times in your post. I hear that not as uncertainty or weakness, but as effort. You're repeatedly choosing to stay present even when your nervous system is telling you to pull back. You're overriding fear responses to remain engaged in the relationship and in this process. That isn't small. That's real work, and it costs energy. "Trying" here doesn't mean you're failing—it means you're actively engaging with something difficult.
You've said more than once that you don't feel ready. I want to be very clear about something important: readiness is not a prerequisite for care, truth, or change to exist. Most people don't feel ready before something like this unfolds. Readiness usually comes later, shaped by lived experience rather than arriving as a feeling of confidence in advance. You are not failing because you don't feel ready. You are responding normally to something that challenges your sense of safety and continuity.
When you say you don't want anything to change, that tells me you're grieving—not just future fears, but the comfort of what felt known and stable. That grief doesn't mean you don't love Cynthia or support her. It means you're human. Something foundational feels uncertain right now, and that deserves acknowledgment, not guilt.
I'm really glad you noticed how your fear is being pulled forward into the future rather than anchored in the present. That insight matters. Right now, what is actually happening is still relatively contained: conversations, therapy, information gathering, small physical changes, community connections. None of this requires you to have everything figured out today. You are allowed to take this one step, one feeling, one conversation at a time.
About the surgical consultation specifically: it makes sense that it feels like such a big step. What often happens in moments like this is that the mind collapses the timeline—consultation becomes a stand-in for everything that might come later. But a consultation is a conversation. No decisions are made, no commitments are locked in, no dates are set. It's information gathering, not a point of no return. Even if Cynthia eventually decides surgery is right for her, there are clear medical timelines and requirements that place that well down the road. This isn't next month, and it isn't even imminent. That time isn't about whether this will happen—it's time for you to find your footing as the changes unfold.
It's okay that you don't feel emotionally ready for that step yet. Letting it happen doesn't mean you're endorsing an outcome you can't imagine. It simply allows information to exist, and information tends to reduce fear over time rather than increase it.
You also named something important when you said things feel like they're moving too fast, even though you know logically that they may not be. That tells me you're already holding two truths at once: the objective pace, and your subjective experience of overwhelm. Both are real. Neither cancels out the other. This is a really good place to work with your therapist—especially around the gap between what you know intellectually and what you feel emotionally.
When you go to therapy on February 4th, it may help to bring that tension with you—how to work with the gap between knowing and feeling, how to sit with fear about pacing without needing to control it, and how to hold space for your own feelings without turning them into a problem. Those are exactly the kinds of things therapy is meant to support.
I'm glad you're staying in communication with Cynthia and that you're being honest about struggling while still showing up. That combination—honesty without withdrawal—is the most important thing happening here. You don't have to feel strong. You don't have to feel settled. You just have to keep bringing your fear into the open where it can be talked about instead of silently driving everything.
One last thing I want to reinforce: Cynthia's medical care can move forward on its own timeline while your emotional processing continues on yours. These don't have to be synchronized for both to be valid. Neither has to wait for the other to be "finished" before it's allowed to continue.
This is hard right now. I won't minimize that. But hard does not mean impossible, and it does not mean you're doing this wrong. Keep using your support systems. Keep naming what you're feeling. Keep taking this in pieces rather than as one overwhelming whole.
You are already showing up. That matters. And I'm here with you.
With care,
— Susan 💜
