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I hope you had a good summer: I did not. The very day we were scheduled to travel for leisure, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have prompt but common surgery, which resulted in our getaway ideas needed to be cancelled.

From this episode I realized a truth valuable, all over again, about how hard it is for me to feel bad when things take a turn. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more everyday, quietly devastating disappointments that – unless we can actually experience them – will really weigh us down.

When we were expected to be on holiday but could not be, I kept feeling a tug towards finding the positive: “I can {book a replacement trip|schedule another vacation|arrange a different getaway”; “At least we have {travel insurance|coverage for trips|protection for journeys”; “This’ll give me {something to write about|material for an article|content for a story”. But I didn't improve, just a bit blue. And then I would face the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery involved frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a finite opportunity for an relaxing trip on the Belgium's beaches. So, no vacation. Just disappointment and frustration, suffering and attention.

I know more serious issues can happen, it's merely a vacation, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I tested that argument too. But what I needed was to be honest with myself. In those moments when I was able to cease resisting the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of experiencing sadness and trying to appear happy, I’ve given myself permission all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and hatred and rage, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even turned out to value our days at home together.

This recalled of a wish I sometimes observe in my therapy clients, and that I have also experienced in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could in some way reverse our unwanted experiences, like pressing a reset button. But that option only looks to the past. Confronting the reality that this is impossible and embracing the grief and rage for things not happening how we expected, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can promote a transformation: from avoidance and sadness, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be transformative.

We think of depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a pressing down of anger and sadness and disappointment and joy and life force, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and freedom.

I have repeatedly found myself trapped in this wish to click “undo”, but my toddler is assisting me in moving past it. As a first-time mom, I was at times swamped by the incredible needs of my baby. Not only the nursing – sometimes for a lengthy period at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the outfit alterations, and then the repeating the process before you’ve even completed the change you were doing. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a reassurance and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, persistent and tiring. What surprised me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the emotional demands.

I had assumed my most key role as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon came to realise that it was unfeasible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her appetite could seem insatiable; my milk could not be produced rapidly, or it came too fast. And then we needed to change her – but she disliked being changed, and cried as if she were plunging into a shadowy pit of misery. And while sometimes she seemed consoled by the embraces we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were distant from us, that nothing we had to offer could help.

I soon realized that my most crucial role as a mother was first to endure, and then to support her in managing the powerful sentiments triggered by the unattainability of my protecting her from all unease. As she enhanced her skill to consume and process milk, she also had to build an ability to process her feelings and her distress when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was suffering, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) irritation, anger, hopelessness, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to guarantee smooth experiences, but to assist in finding significance to her sentimental path of things not working out ideally.

This was the difference, for her, between experiencing someone who was attempting to provide her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being supported in building a skill to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the distinction, for me, between aiming to have wonderful about executing ideally as a perfect mother, and instead building the ability to accept my own shortcomings in order to do a adequately performed – and grasp my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The contrast between my attempting to halt her crying, and recognizing when she needed to cry.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel reduced the wish to click erase and alter our history into one where everything goes well. I find faith in my awareness of a skill evolving internally to acknowledge that this is unattainable, and to understand that, when I’m focused on striving to reschedule a vacation, what I actually want is to cry.