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I hope you had a good summer: I did not. That day we were planning to take a vacation, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have prompt but common surgery, which meant our travel plans needed to be cancelled.

From this experience I realized a truth important, all over again, about how hard it is for me to feel bad when things take a turn. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more routine, quietly devastating disappointments that – unless we can actually acknowledge them – will really weigh us down.

When we were supposed to be on holiday but weren't, I kept feeling a tug 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 remained low, just a bit blue. And then I would confront the reality that this holiday had truly vanished: my husband’s surgery involved frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a short period for an relaxing trip on the Belgium's beaches. So, no vacation. Just disappointment and frustration, pain and care.

I know graver situations can happen, it’s only a holiday, such a fortunate concern to have – I know because I tested that argument too. But what I wanted was to be honest with myself. In those instances when I was able to halt battling the disappointment and we discussed it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of experiencing sadness and trying to smile, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and aversion and wrath, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even was feasible to enjoy our time at home together.

This recalled of a hope I sometimes observe in my therapy clients, and that I have also seen in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could perhaps undo our negative events, like clicking “undo”. But that option only goes in reverse. Facing the reality that this is unattainable and accepting the grief and rage for things not happening how we expected, rather than a false optimism, can promote a transformation: from rejection and low mood, to development and opportunity. 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 numbing of all emotions, a repressing of anger and sadness and letdown and happiness and vitality, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and freedom.

I have repeatedly found myself stuck in this desire to reverse things, but my young child is assisting me in moving past it. As a new mother, I was at times swamped by the amazing requirements of my infant. Not only the feeding – sometimes for over an hour at a time, and then again less than an hour after that – and not only the outfit alterations, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even ended the swap you were handling. These everyday important activities among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a reassurance and a tremendous privilege. Though they’re also, at moments, persistent and tiring. What shocked me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the psychological needs.

I had assumed my most key role as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon understood that it was not possible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her craving could seem unmeetable; my supply could not arrive quickly, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she despised being changed, and cried 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 lost to us, that no solution we provided could assist.

I soon discovered that my most crucial role as a mother was first to survive, and then to help her digest the overwhelming feelings provoked by the impossibility of my protecting her from all unease. As she enhanced her skill to consume and process milk, she also had to build an ability to manage her sentiments and her suffering when the supply was insufficient, or when she was hurting, 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 make things go well, but to assist in finding significance to her emotional experience of things not working out ideally.

This was the distinction, for her, between experiencing someone who was seeking to offer her only good feelings, and instead being supported in building a capacity to feel every emotion. It was the difference, for me, between desiring to experience wonderful about executing ideally as a flawless caregiver, and instead building the ability to accept my own imperfections in order to do a sufficiently well – and grasp my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The contrast between my trying to stop her crying, and understanding when she needed to cry.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel reduced the wish to press reverse and rewrite our story into one where everything goes well. I find faith in my awareness of a capacity evolving internally to acknowledge that this is impossible, and to realize that, when I’m busy trying to rearrange a trip, what I really need is to weep.