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I hope you had a pleasant summer: my experience was different. That day we were scheduled to travel for leisure, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, expecting him to have prompt but common surgery, which resulted in our travel plans needed to be cancelled.

From this experience I learned something important, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to feel bad when things go wrong. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more common, subtly crushing disappointments that – unless we can actually acknowledge them – will significantly depress us.

When we were meant 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 blue. And then I would confront the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery required frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a finite opportunity for an pleasant vacation on the Belgian coast. So, no holiday. Just disappointment and frustration, suffering and attention.

I know more serious issues can happen, it's merely a vacation, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I tested that argument too. But what I wanted was to be sincere with my feelings. In those moments when I was able to stop fighting off the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were facing it as a team. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to appear happy, I’ve granted myself all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and aversion and wrath, which at least felt real. At times, it even turned out to enjoy our time at home together.

This recalled of a hope I sometimes observe in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could in some way undo our negative events, like hitting a reverse switch. But that arrow only goes in reverse. Acknowledging the reality that this is not possible and allowing the grief and rage for things not happening how we anticipated, rather than a false optimism, can facilitate a change of current: from rejection and low mood, to development and opportunity. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be transformative.

We consider depression as experiencing negativity – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a pressing down of frustration and sorrow and frustration and delight and vitality, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and freedom.

I have frequently found myself stuck in this wish to reverse things, but my little one is supporting my evolution. As a new mother, I was at times burdened by the incredible needs of my newborn. Not only the nourishing – sometimes for more than 60 minutes at a time, and then again under 60 minutes after that – and not only the diaper swaps, and then the changing again before you’ve even ended the swap you were handling. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a comfort and a tremendous privilege. Though they’re also, at moments, persistent and tiring. What astounded me the most – aside from the sleep deprivation – were the psychological needs.

I had thought my most key role as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon realized that it was not possible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her appetite could seem insatiable; my nourishment could not come fast enough, or it came too fast. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she despised being changed, and wept as if she were falling into a gloomy abyss of despair. And while sometimes she seemed soothed by the hugs we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were lost to us, that nothing we had to offer could help.

I soon realized that my most crucial role as a mother was first to endure, and then to support her in managing the overwhelming feelings triggered by the impossibility of my protecting her from all unease. As she grew her ability to consume and process milk, she also had to develop a capacity to process her feelings and her distress 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) annoyance, fury, despondency, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to ensure everything was perfect, but to assist in finding significance to her feelings journey of things not working out ideally.

This was the difference, for her, between experiencing someone who was trying to give her only positive emotions, and instead being assisted in developing a ability to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the contrast, for me, between wanting to feel excellent about performing flawlessly as a ideal parent, and instead cultivating the skill to tolerate my own imperfections in order to do a adequately performed – and understand my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The distinction between my attempting to halt her crying, and recognizing when she had to sob.

Now that we have developed beyond this together, I feel not as strongly the urge to press reverse and alter our history into one where everything goes well. I find optimism in my sense of a capacity developing within to recognise that this is unattainable, and to realize that, when I’m occupied with attempting to rearrange a trip, what I actually want is to weep.