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I hope you had a enjoyable summer: mine was not. The very day we were planning to go on holiday, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have urgent but routine surgery, which resulted in our vacation arrangements were forced to be cancelled.

From this episode I gained insight significant, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to acknowledge pain when things go wrong. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more routine, subtly crushing disappointments that – if we don't actually experience them – will truly burden us.

When we were expected to be on holiday but were not, I kept experiencing a pull 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 remained low, just a bit depressed. And then I would confront the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery involved frequent uncomfortable wound care, and there is a limited time window for an relaxing trip on the Belgium's beaches. So, no holiday. Just discontent and annoyance, suffering and attention.

I know worse things can happen, it's merely a vacation, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I tested that argument too. But what I required was to be sincere with my feelings. In those times 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 given myself permission all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and loathing and fury, which at least felt real. At times, it even became possible to value our days at home together.

This reminded me of a hope I sometimes observe in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also experienced in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could in some way reverse our unwanted experiences, like clicking “undo”. But that arrow only points backwards. Acknowledging the reality that this is unattainable and embracing the pain and fury for things not working out how we anticipated, rather than a insincere positive spin, can promote a transformation: from denial and depression, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be life-changing.

We view depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a suppressing of frustration and sorrow and letdown and happiness and vitality, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and liberty.

I have repeatedly found myself caught in this desire to click “undo”, but my toddler is supporting my evolution. As a new mother, I was at times swamped by the amazing requirements of my infant. Not only the nourishing – sometimes for a lengthy period at a time, and then again under 60 minutes after that – and not only the changing, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even ended the change you were changing. These everyday important activities among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a reassurance and a tremendous privilege. Though they’re also, at moments, persistent and tiring. What shocked me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the emotional demands.

I had thought my most primary duty as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon understood that it was unfeasible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her appetite could seem unmeetable; my nourishment could not be produced rapidly, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she disliked being changed, and wept as if she were plunging into a gloomy abyss of despair. And while sometimes she seemed soothed by the cuddles we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were lost to us, that no solution we provided could help.

I soon discovered that my most important job as a mother was first to persevere, and then to assist her process the powerful sentiments triggered by the unattainability of my shielding her from all discomfort. As she grew her ability to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to manage her sentiments and her suffering when the supply was insufficient, or when she was in pain, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to guarantee smooth experiences, but to help bring meaning to her feelings journey of things not working out ideally.

This was the contrast, for her, between having someone who was seeking to offer her only good feelings, and instead being assisted in developing a capacity to feel every emotion. It was the distinction, for me, between aiming to have great about performing flawlessly as a perfect mother, and instead cultivating the skill to endure my own imperfections in order to do a good enough job – and grasp my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The distinction between my trying to stop her crying, and understanding when she required to weep.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel less keenly the wish to press reverse and rewrite our story into one where things are ideal. I find optimism in my sense of a skill developing within to recognise that this is impossible, and to comprehend that, when I’m busy trying to rearrange a trip, what I really need is to sob.