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I wish you enjoyed a good summer: my experience was different. On the day we were scheduled to go on holiday, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have prompt but common surgery, which meant our vacation arrangements needed to be cancelled.

From this situation I realized a truth significant, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to feel bad when things go wrong. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more routine, gently heartbreaking disappointments that – without the ability to actually feel them – will truly burden us.

When we were expected to be on holiday but weren't, I kept experiencing a pull 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 remained low, just a bit blue. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery involved frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a limited time window for an enjoyable break on the shores of Belgium. So, no getaway. Just disappointment and frustration, pain and care.

I know graver situations can happen, it’s only a holiday, what a privileged problem to have – I know because I tried that line too. But what I wanted was to be honest with myself. In those instances 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 feeling depressed and trying to appear happy, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to anger and frustration and loathing and fury, 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 psychotherapy patients, and that I have also seen in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could somehow reverse our unwanted experiences, like pressing a reset button. But that option only looks to the past. Facing the reality that this is impossible and accepting the pain and fury for things not turning out how we hoped, rather than a false optimism, can enable a shift: from rejection and low mood, to development and opportunity. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be life-changing.

We view depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a repressing of anger and sadness and frustration and delight and life force, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and freedom.

I have often found myself caught in this urge to reverse things, but my young child is assisting me in moving past it. As a first-time mom, I was at times burdened by the incredible needs of my newborn. Not only the nursing – sometimes for more than 60 minutes at a time, and then again under 60 minutes after that – and not only the changing, and then the repeating the process before you’ve even completed the task you were changing. These routine valuable duties among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – are a reassurance and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What surprised me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the feelings requirements.

I had assumed 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 needed it. Her hunger could seem insatiable; my milk could not be produced rapidly, or it came too fast. And then we needed to alter her clothes – but she hated being changed, and cried as if she were descending into a shadowy pit of misery. And while sometimes she seemed comforted by the hugs we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were distant from us, that no comfort we gave could aid.

I soon realized that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to persevere, and then to assist her process the overwhelming feelings triggered by the impossibility of my guarding her from all unease. As she developed her capacity to consume and process milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to manage her sentiments and her pain when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was suffering, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to guarantee smooth experiences, but to help bring meaning to her sentimental path of things not going so well.

This was the distinction, for her, between being with someone who was attempting to provide her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being helped to grow a ability to experience all feelings. It was the distinction, for me, between wanting to feel great about executing ideally as a perfect mother, and instead building the ability to endure my own imperfections in order to do a good enough job – and grasp my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The difference between my attempting to halt her crying, and comprehending when she needed to cry.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel not as strongly the urge to press reverse and change our narrative into one where everything goes well. I find faith in my sense of a capacity growing inside me to recognise that this is unattainable, and to comprehend that, when I’m focused on striving to reschedule a vacation, what I actually want is to sob.