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I trust your a pleasant summer: my experience was different. On the day we were supposed to be travel for leisure, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, expecting him to have urgent but routine surgery, which meant our getaway ideas had to be cancelled.

From this experience I learned something significant, all over again, about how hard it is for me to feel bad when things don't work out. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more routine, subtly crushing disappointments that – without the ability to actually feel them – will significantly depress us.

When we were supposed to be on holiday but weren't, I kept sensing an urge 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 down. And then I would confront the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a limited time window for an relaxing trip on the Belgian coast. So, no vacation. Just letdown and irritation, pain and care.

I know graver situations can happen, it's merely a vacation, what a privileged problem to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I required was to be honest with myself. In those moments when I was able to stop fighting off the disappointment and we talked about it instead, it felt like we were going through something together. Instead of experiencing sadness and trying to put on a brave face, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to anger and frustration and aversion and wrath, which at least felt real. At times, it even was feasible to appreciate our moments at home together.

This reminded me of a desire I sometimes observe in my therapy clients, and that I have also seen in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could perhaps reverse our unwanted experiences, like hitting a reverse switch. But that arrow only looks to the past. Facing the reality that this is unattainable and embracing the pain and fury for things not turning out how we anticipated, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can promote a transformation: from avoidance and sadness, to development and opportunity. Over time – and, of course, it needs duration – this can be profoundly impactful.

We think of depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a pressing down of frustration and sorrow and letdown and happiness and vitality, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and release.

I have repeatedly found myself trapped in this desire to click “undo”, but my little one is assisting me in moving past it. As a new mother, I was at times overwhelmed by the amazing requirements of my baby. Not only the feeding – sometimes for a lengthy period at a time, and then again less than an hour after that – and not only the changing, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even completed the change you were changing. These everyday important activities among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a comfort 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 feelings requirements.

I had thought my most important job 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 required it. Her appetite could seem insatiable; my nourishment could not be produced rapidly, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she despised being changed, and sobbed as if she were falling into a shadowy pit of misery. And while sometimes she seemed soothed by the hugs we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were separated from us, that no solution we provided could aid.

I soon discovered that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to persevere, and then to help her digest the overwhelming feelings caused by the impossibility of my protecting her from all distress. As she enhanced her skill to consume and process milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to digest her emotions and her suffering when the milk didn’t come, or when she was in pain, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to evolve with her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, hatred, disappointment, hunger. My job was not to ensure everything was perfect, but to support in creating understanding to her sentimental path of things not working out ideally.

This was the distinction, for her, between having someone who was trying to give her only positive emotions, and instead being assisted in developing a skill to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the difference, for me, between desiring to experience wonderful about performing flawlessly as a flawless caregiver, and instead cultivating the skill to tolerate my own shortcomings in order to do a adequately performed – and understand my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The distinction between my trying to stop her crying, and comprehending when she needed to cry.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel not as strongly the wish to hit “undo” and change our narrative into one where things are ideal. I find optimism in my feeling of a skill evolving internally to acknowledge that this is impossible, and to realize that, when I’m focused on striving to rebook a holiday, what I really need is to weep.