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I hope you had a good summer: my experience was different. The very day we were supposed to be travel for leisure, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which caused our vacation arrangements were forced to be cancelled.

From this situation I realized a truth valuable, all over again, about how hard it is for me to acknowledge pain when things don't work out. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more routine, gently heartbreaking disappointments that – if we don't actually feel them – will significantly depress us.

When we were expected to be on holiday but could not be, I kept experiencing a pull towards seeking optimism: “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 remained low, just a bit depressed. And then I would confront the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery required frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a limited time window for an enjoyable break on the Belgian coast. So, no holiday. Just letdown and irritation, pain and care.

I know more serious issues can happen, it's merely a vacation, what a privileged problem to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I wanted was to be truthful to myself. In those moments when I was able to stop fighting off the disappointment and we discussed it instead, it felt like we were going through something together. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to appear happy, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to anger and frustration and loathing and fury, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even turned out to value our days at home together.

This reminded me of a wish I sometimes see in my therapy clients, and that I have also seen in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could perhaps reverse our unwanted experiences, like clicking “undo”. But that arrow only goes in reverse. Acknowledging the reality that this is impossible and accepting the pain and fury for things not turning out how we hoped, rather than a insincere positive spin, can enable a shift: from avoidance and sadness, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be life-changing.

We consider depression as experiencing negativity – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a repressing of rage and grief and frustration and delight and vitality, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and freedom.

I have often found myself stuck in this urge to reverse things, but my toddler is helping me to grow out of it. As a new mother, I was at times swamped by the astonishing demands of my baby. Not only the nourishing – sometimes for more than 60 minutes at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the outfit alterations, and then the changing again before you’ve even ended the change you were handling. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a comfort and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, persistent and tiring. What astounded me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the psychological needs.

I had thought my most important job as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon understood that it was unfeasible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her hunger could seem endless; my supply could not be produced rapidly, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to change her – but she hated being changed, and sobbed as if she were falling into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed consoled by the cuddles we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were separated from us, that no comfort we gave could assist.

I soon realized that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to survive, and then to support her in managing the overwhelming feelings caused by the impossibility of my guarding her from all distress. As she enhanced her skill to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to manage her sentiments and her pain when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was in pain, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to make things go well, but to assist in finding significance to her emotional experience of things not going so well.

This was the difference, for her, between being with someone who was trying to give her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being supported in building a capacity to experience all feelings. It was the contrast, for me, between aiming to have excellent about doing a perfect job as a perfect mother, and instead cultivating the skill to tolerate my own imperfections in order to do a adequately performed – and understand my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The contrast between my attempting to halt her crying, and understanding when she had to sob.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel less keenly the urge to hit “undo” and rewrite our story into one where all is perfect. I find optimism in my feeling of a ability growing inside me to understand that this is not possible, and to comprehend that, when I’m focused on striving to rebook a holiday, what I truly require is to cry.