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I wish you enjoyed a good summer: my experience was different. The very day we were planning to take a vacation, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have prompt but common surgery, which resulted in our getaway ideas were forced to be cancelled.

From this situation I learned something valuable, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to feel bad when things don't work out. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more common, gently heartbreaking disappointments that – unless we can actually feel them – will significantly depress us.

When we were meant to be on holiday but weren't, I kept sensing an urge towards finding the positive: “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 painful bandage replacements, and there is a short period for an enjoyable break on the shores of Belgium. So, no vacation. Just disappointment and frustration, pain and care.

I know graver situations can happen, it’s only a holiday, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I tried that line too. But what I needed was to be sincere with my feelings. In those instances when I was able to halt battling the disappointment and we talked about it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of experiencing sadness and trying to put on a brave face, I’ve granted myself all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to anger and frustration and loathing and fury, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even became possible to appreciate our moments at home together.

This reminded me of a hope I sometimes notice in my therapy clients, and that I have also seen in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could in some way reverse our unwanted experiences, like clicking “undo”. But that button only goes in reverse. Confronting the reality that this is not possible and accepting the pain and fury for things not happening how we anticipated, rather than a false optimism, can enable a shift: from avoidance and sadness, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be transformative.

We view depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a pressing down of frustration and sorrow and letdown and happiness and vitality, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of honest emotional expression and liberty.

I have repeatedly found myself caught in this urge to click “undo”, but my little one is assisting me in moving past it. As a new mother, I was at times burdened by the incredible needs of my newborn. Not only the feeding – sometimes for more than 60 minutes at a time, and then again less than an hour after that – and not only the outfit alterations, and then the changing again before you’ve even finished the change you were changing. These everyday important activities among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a solace and a tremendous privilege. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What surprised me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the feelings requirements.

I had believed my most key role as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon understood that it was impossible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her hunger could seem unmeetable; my nourishment could not arrive quickly, or it came too fast. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she disliked being changed, and sobbed as if she were falling into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed comforted by the embraces we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were distant from us, that no solution we provided could help.

I soon discovered that my most crucial role as a mother was first to persevere, and then to assist her process the powerful sentiments provoked by the unattainability of my protecting her from all discomfort. As she grew her ability to take in and digest milk, she also had to develop a capacity to process her feelings and her pain when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was in pain, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to guarantee smooth experiences, but to support in creating understanding to her emotional experience of things being less than perfect.

This was the distinction, for her, between having someone who was trying to give her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being assisted in developing a ability to feel every emotion. It was the difference, for me, between wanting to feel great about executing ideally as a perfect mother, and instead developing the capacity to tolerate my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a sufficiently well – and grasp my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The distinction between my attempting to halt her crying, and comprehending when she needed to cry.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel reduced the wish to hit “undo” and rewrite our story into one where things are ideal. I find optimism in my feeling of a ability evolving internally to understand that this is unattainable, and to realize that, when I’m busy trying to rearrange a trip, what I truly require is to weep.