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I wish you enjoyed a enjoyable summer: I did not. On the day we were planning to go on holiday, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have prompt but common surgery, which meant our travel plans were forced to be cancelled.

From this experience I learned something valuable, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to experience sadness when things take a turn. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more common, subtly crushing disappointments that – without the ability to actually experience them – will significantly depress us.

When we were supposed to be on holiday but could not be, 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 down. And then I would confront the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery required frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a short period for an pleasant vacation on the shores of Belgium. So, no getaway. Just discontent and annoyance, suffering and attention.

I know graver situations can happen, it's merely a vacation, an enviable dilemma 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 cease resisting the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to appear happy, I’ve given myself permission all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and hatred and rage, which at least felt real. At times, it even turned out to enjoy our time at home together.

This brought to mind of a hope I sometimes see in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also experienced in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could perhaps reverse our unwanted experiences, like pressing a reset button. But that button only goes in reverse. Confronting the reality that this is not possible and allowing the grief and rage for things not working out how we anticipated, rather than a false optimism, can facilitate a change of current: from avoidance and sadness, to development and opportunity. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be transformative.

We think of depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a pressing down of anger and sadness and frustration and delight and vitality, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and freedom.

I have often found myself trapped in this wish to erase events, but my young child is helping me to grow out of it. As a new mother, I was at times overwhelmed by the incredible needs of my newborn. Not only the nourishing – sometimes for a lengthy period at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the diaper swaps, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even finished the change you were doing. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – are a comfort and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What shocked me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the emotional demands.

I had believed my most important job as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon realized that it was impossible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her craving could seem insatiable; my supply could not be produced rapidly, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to alter her clothes – but she disliked being changed, and wept as if she were descending into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed consoled by the hugs we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were separated from us, that no solution we provided could assist.

I soon discovered that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to survive, and then to assist her process the overwhelming feelings provoked by the infeasibility of my shielding her from all unease. As she enhanced her skill to take in and digest milk, she also had to build an ability to process her feelings and her pain when the supply was insufficient, or when she was suffering, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to develop alongside her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to make things go well, but to support in creating understanding to her emotional experience of things not going so well.

This was the difference, for her, between being with someone who was trying to give her only positive emotions, and instead being supported in building a ability to experience all feelings. It was the distinction, for me, between wanting to feel great about performing flawlessly as a flawless caregiver, and instead cultivating the skill to endure my own shortcomings in order to do a good enough job – and grasp my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The difference between my attempting to halt her crying, and comprehending when she required to weep.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel not as strongly the desire to click erase and rewrite our story into one where everything goes well. I find faith in my feeling of a skill evolving internally to understand that this is impossible, and to comprehend that, when I’m focused on striving to rebook a holiday, what I truly require is to cry.