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I wish you enjoyed a enjoyable summer: my experience was different. The very day we were scheduled to take a vacation, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, expecting him to have urgent but routine surgery, which meant our travel plans needed to be cancelled.

From this situation I realized a truth significant, all over again, about how hard it is for me to experience sadness when things take a turn. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more everyday, quietly devastating disappointments that – unless we can actually feel them – will significantly depress us.

When we were supposed to be on holiday but weren't, I kept feeling a tug 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 never felt better, just a bit depressed. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday had truly vanished: my husband’s surgery involved frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a limited time window for an enjoyable break on the Belgium's beaches. So, no holiday. Just disappointment and frustration, suffering and attention.

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 wanted was to be honest with myself. In those instances when I was able to cease resisting 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 granted myself all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and loathing and fury, which at least felt real. At times, it even turned out to appreciate our moments at home together.

This recalled of a desire I sometimes notice in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also experienced in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could somehow undo our negative events, like pressing a reset button. But that option only looks to the past. Confronting the reality that this is unattainable and embracing the grief and rage for things not turning out how we hoped, rather than a false optimism, can facilitate a change of current: from avoidance and sadness, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be transformative.

We view depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a suppressing of anger and sadness and letdown and happiness and vitality, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of honest emotional expression and liberty.

I have often found myself stuck in this wish to reverse things, but my young child is supporting my evolution. As a new mother, I was at times overwhelmed by the astonishing demands of my baby. Not only the nursing – sometimes for over an hour at a time, and then again less than an hour after that – and not only the outfit alterations, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even completed the swap you were doing. These routine valuable duties among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – are a comfort and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What astounded me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the emotional demands.

I had believed 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 fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her hunger could seem endless; my supply could not arrive quickly, or it came too fast. And then we needed to change her – but she despised being changed, and wept as if she were falling into a shadowy pit of misery. And while sometimes she seemed consoled by the cuddles we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were distant 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 assist her process the powerful sentiments caused by the impossibility of my shielding her from all distress. As she developed her capacity to take in and digest milk, she also had to develop a capacity to manage her sentiments and her distress when the supply was insufficient, or when she was hurting, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to evolve with her (and my) irritation, anger, hopelessness, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to ensure everything was perfect, but to help bring meaning to her feelings journey of things not going so well.

This was the difference, for her, between having someone who was attempting to provide her only positive emotions, and instead being helped to grow a skill to feel every emotion. It was the difference, for me, between desiring to experience excellent about executing ideally as a flawless caregiver, and instead developing the capacity to tolerate my own imperfections in order to do a sufficiently well – and comprehend my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The contrast between my attempting to halt her crying, and recognizing when she required to weep.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel reduced the desire to press reverse and alter our history into one where everything goes well. I find optimism in my feeling of a ability developing within to acknowledge that this is unattainable, and to understand that, when I’m occupied with attempting to rebook a holiday, what I really need is to cry.