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I wish you enjoyed a good summer: I did not. On the day we were supposed to be take a vacation, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, expecting him to have prompt but common surgery, which meant our travel plans were forced to be cancelled.

From this experience I realized a truth important, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to experience sadness when things don't work out. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more everyday, gently heartbreaking disappointments that – unless we can actually experience them – will really weigh us down.

When we were supposed to be on holiday but were not, I kept sensing an urge towards looking for silver linings: “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 face the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a limited time window for an enjoyable break on the Belgian coast. So, no holiday. Just disappointment and frustration, hurt and nurturing.

I know graver situations can happen, it's just a trip, what a privileged problem to have – I know because I tested that argument too. But what I needed was to be truthful to myself. In those moments when I was able to stop fighting off the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were going through something together. Instead of being down and trying to appear happy, I’ve granted myself all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and hatred and rage, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even became possible to value our days at home together.

This reminded me of a desire I sometimes see in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also seen in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could somehow reverse our unwanted experiences, like hitting a reverse switch. But that button only points backwards. Facing the reality that this is impossible and allowing the pain and fury for things not happening how we hoped, rather than a insincere positive spin, can promote a transformation: from rejection and low mood, to development and opportunity. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be profoundly impactful.

We view depression as experiencing negativity – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a repressing of rage and grief and letdown and happiness and life force, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and liberty.

I have often found myself caught in this wish to click “undo”, but my little one is helping me to grow out of it. As a first-time mom, I was at times burdened by the incredible needs of my baby. Not only the nourishing – sometimes for a lengthy period at a time, and then again less than an hour after that – and not only the diaper swaps, and then the changing again before you’ve even completed the task you were doing. These everyday important activities among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a solace and a tremendous privilege. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What surprised 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 fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon came to realise that it was impossible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her hunger could seem unmeetable; my milk could not come fast enough, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she disliked being changed, and wept as if she were descending into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed comforted by the cuddles we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were distant from us, that nothing we had to offer could aid.

I soon discovered that my most important job as a mother was first to endure, and then to assist her process the powerful sentiments caused by the infeasibility of my protecting her from all discomfort. As she grew her ability to take in and digest milk, she also had to build an ability to digest her emotions and her distress when the supply was insufficient, or when she was in pain, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to evolve with her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to make things go well, but to help bring meaning to her emotional experience of things not working out ideally.

This was the contrast, for her, between experiencing someone who was seeking to offer her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being assisted in developing a ability to experience all feelings. It was the difference, for me, between aiming to have wonderful about performing flawlessly as a ideal parent, and instead developing the capacity to tolerate my own shortcomings in order to do a good enough job – and understand my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The contrast between my trying to stop her crying, and understanding when she needed to cry.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel not as strongly the wish to click erase and rewrite our story into one where all is perfect. I find hope in my feeling of a capacity developing within to acknowledge that this is impossible, and to understand that, when I’m occupied with attempting to rebook a holiday, what I truly require is to sob.