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I hope you had a enjoyable summer: my experience was different. The very day we were planning to take a vacation, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which meant our getaway ideas had to be cancelled.

From this experience I learned something important, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to feel bad when things take a turn. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more routine, quietly devastating disappointments that – without the ability to actually experience them – will truly burden us.

When we were meant to be on holiday but weren't, 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 never felt better, just a bit depressed. And then I would confront the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery required frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a limited time window for an enjoyable break on the shores of Belgium. So, no vacation. Just letdown and irritation, suffering and attention.

I know more serious issues can happen, it’s only a holiday, such a fortunate concern to have – I know because I tried that line too. But what I required was to be truthful to myself. In those moments when I was able to cease resisting the disappointment and we talked about it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of experiencing sadness and trying to smile, I’ve given myself permission all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and aversion and wrath, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even turned out to value our days at home together.

This brought to mind of a wish I sometimes observe in my therapy clients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could perhaps reverse our unwanted experiences, like clicking “undo”. But that arrow only looks to the past. Confronting the reality that this is unattainable and allowing the grief and rage for things not working out how we hoped, rather than a false optimism, can enable a shift: from rejection and low mood, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be life-changing.

We view depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a repressing of anger and sadness and disappointment and joy and life force, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but acknowledging every sentiment, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and freedom.

I have frequently found myself stuck in this desire to reverse things, but my young child is assisting me in moving past it. As a recent parent, I was at times swamped by the astonishing demands of my infant. Not only the nursing – sometimes for a lengthy period at a time, and then again less than an hour after that – and not only the outfit alterations, and then the repeating the process before you’ve even finished the swap you were doing. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a comfort and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What surprised me the most – aside from the sleep deprivation – were the feelings requirements.

I had believed my most key role as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon realized that it was impossible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her craving could seem insatiable; my supply could not be produced rapidly, or it came too fast. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she hated being changed, and sobbed as if she were descending into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed comforted by the embraces we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were separated from us, that nothing we had to offer could aid.

I soon realized that my most crucial role as a mother was first to survive, and then to assist her process the overwhelming feelings triggered by the impossibility of my protecting her from all distress. As she grew her ability to take in and digest milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to process her feelings and her distress when the milk didn’t come, or when she was in pain, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to evolve with her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to guarantee smooth experiences, but to support in creating understanding to her sentimental path of things not going so well.

This was the contrast, for her, between experiencing someone who was trying to give her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being assisted in developing a capacity to feel every emotion. It was the difference, for me, between wanting to feel great about doing a perfect job as a ideal parent, and instead cultivating the skill to tolerate my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a adequately performed – and grasp my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The difference between my trying to stop her crying, and understanding when she had to sob.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel reduced the wish to click erase and alter our history into one where all is perfect. I find faith in my awareness of a capacity developing within to acknowledge that this is not possible, and to comprehend that, when I’m busy trying to rebook a holiday, what I really need is to weep.