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I wish you enjoyed a pleasant summer: mine was not. That day we were supposed to be go on holiday, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which caused our travel plans needed to be cancelled.

From this situation I learned something important, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to experience sadness when things take a turn. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more routine, subtly crushing disappointments that – if we don't actually acknowledge them – will really weigh us down.

When we were supposed to be on holiday but were not, I kept feeling a tug 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 bump up against the reality that this holiday had truly vanished: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a short period for an pleasant vacation on the shores of Belgium. So, no getaway. Just letdown and irritation, hurt and nurturing.

I know graver situations can happen, it's merely a vacation, what a privileged problem to have – I know because I tried that line too. But what I wanted was to be sincere with my feelings. In those instances when I was able to stop fighting off the disappointment and we talked about it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of experiencing sadness and trying to appear happy, I’ve granted myself all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and aversion and wrath, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even turned out to enjoy our time at home together.

This brought to mind of a hope I sometimes notice in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could in some way erase our difficult moments, like hitting a reverse switch. But that option only goes in reverse. Confronting the reality that this is unattainable and allowing the grief and rage for things not working out how we hoped, rather than a insincere positive spin, 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 life-changing.

We think of depression as experiencing negativity – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a repressing of anger and sadness and letdown and happiness 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 repeatedly found myself stuck in this urge to click “undo”, but my young child is assisting me in moving past it. As a first-time mom, I was at times swamped by the incredible needs of my baby. Not only the nursing – sometimes for over an hour at a time, and then again under 60 minutes 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 everyday important activities among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – are a comfort and a tremendous privilege. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What surprised me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the psychological needs.

I had believed my most key role 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 demanded it. Her hunger could seem endless; my milk could not arrive quickly, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she hated being changed, and sobbed as if she were descending into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed soothed by the hugs we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were distant from us, that nothing we had to offer could assist.

I soon discovered that my most crucial role as a mother was first to endure, and then to assist her process the powerful sentiments provoked by the impossibility of my shielding her from all unease. As she grew her ability to take in and digest milk, she also had to develop a capacity to process her feelings and her suffering when the supply was insufficient, or when she was in pain, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to make things go well, but to assist in finding significance to her emotional experience of things being less than perfect.

This was the difference, for her, between having someone who was attempting to provide her only good feelings, and instead being helped to grow a skill to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the distinction, for me, between wanting to feel great about executing ideally as a flawless caregiver, and instead developing the capacity to accept my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a good enough job – and grasp my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The difference between my attempting to halt her crying, and comprehending when she needed to cry.

Now that we have developed beyond this together, I feel reduced the urge to press reverse and alter our history into one where all is perfect. I find hope in my sense of a skill growing inside me to recognise that this is impossible, and to understand that, when I’m focused on striving to rearrange a trip, what I actually want is to cry.