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I hope you had a good summer: mine was not. The very day we were planning to take a vacation, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which caused our travel plans had to be cancelled.

From this episode I realized a truth valuable, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to experience sadness when things don't work out. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more routine, subtly crushing disappointments that – without the ability to actually experience them – will significantly depress us.

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 down. And then I would face 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 enjoyable break on the shores of Belgium. So, no holiday. Just letdown and irritation, hurt and nurturing.

I know worse things can happen, it’s only a holiday, what a privileged problem to have – I know because I tried that line too. But what I required was to be honest with myself. In those instances when I was able to halt battling the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were facing it as a team. Instead of experiencing sadness and trying to put on a brave face, I’ve given myself permission all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to anger and frustration and hatred and rage, which at least felt real. At times, it even was feasible to value our days 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 patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could somehow erase our difficult moments, like hitting a reverse switch. But that arrow only goes in reverse. Facing the reality that this is not possible and accepting the grief and rage for things not happening how we hoped, 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 profoundly impactful.

We consider depression as experiencing negativity – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a repressing of frustration and sorrow and disappointment and joy and energy, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and freedom.

I have frequently found myself stuck 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 astonishing demands of my newborn. 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 changing, and then the changing again before you’ve even ended the swap you were doing. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a comfort and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, persistent and tiring. What shocked me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the emotional demands.

I had assumed my most primary duty as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon understood that it was not possible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her craving could seem endless; my nourishment could not be produced rapidly, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to alter her clothes – but she disliked being changed, and cried as if she were falling into a gloomy abyss of despair. 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 solution we provided could aid.

I soon discovered that my most important job as a mother was first to persevere, and then to help her digest the overwhelming feelings triggered by the infeasibility of my protecting her from all discomfort. As she developed her capacity to take in and digest milk, she also had to build an ability to manage her sentiments and her distress when the milk didn’t come, or when she was suffering, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to evolve with her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, hatred, disappointment, hunger. My job was not to make things go well, but to assist in finding significance to her feelings journey of things not working out ideally.

This was the distinction, for her, between experiencing someone who was trying to give her only positive emotions, and instead being helped to grow 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 far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a sufficiently well – and grasp my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The difference between my attempting to halt her crying, and recognizing when she required to weep.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel not as strongly the desire to hit “undo” and rewrite our story into one where all is perfect. I find hope in my feeling of a capacity evolving internally to recognise that this is not possible, and to comprehend that, when I’m busy trying to rearrange a trip, what I actually want is to weep.