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I hope you had a good summer: my experience was different. The very 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 caused our vacation arrangements were forced to be cancelled.

From this experience I learned something valuable, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to feel bad when things go wrong. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more routine, gently heartbreaking disappointments that – if we don't actually feel them – will significantly depress us.

When we were meant to be on holiday but could not be, I kept experiencing a pull 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 remained low, just a bit depressed. And then I would face the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a limited time window for an relaxing trip on the Belgium's beaches. So, no holiday. Just discontent and annoyance, pain and care.

I know graver situations can happen, it’s only a holiday, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I needed 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 sharing an experience. Instead of experiencing sadness and trying to appear happy, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and hatred and rage, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even turned out to enjoy our time at home together.

This recalled of a desire I sometimes observe in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could somehow undo our negative events, like hitting a reverse switch. But that button only goes in reverse. Confronting the reality that this is not possible and accepting the grief and rage for things not happening how we anticipated, rather than a false optimism, can facilitate a change of current: from avoidance and sadness, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be life-changing.

We view 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 substitute for depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of honest emotional expression and liberty.

I have repeatedly found myself stuck in this desire to reverse things, but my little one is assisting me in moving past it. As a new mother, I was at times swamped by the astonishing demands of my newborn. Not only the nourishing – sometimes for more than 60 minutes at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the outfit alterations, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even ended the task you were handling. These everyday important activities among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a reassurance and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, persistent and tiring. What surprised me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the psychological needs.

I had thought my most important job as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon came to realise that it was not possible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her appetite could seem insatiable; my nourishment could not come fast enough, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to change her – but she hated being changed, and wept as if she were descending into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed consoled by the cuddles we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were distant from us, that no comfort we gave could help.

I soon discovered that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to survive, and then to support her in managing the overwhelming feelings caused by the impossibility of my protecting her from all unease. As she grew her ability to take in and digest milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to process her feelings and her distress when the milk didn’t come, or when she was hurting, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to develop alongside 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 emotional experience of things being less than perfect.

This was the contrast, for her, between experiencing someone who was attempting to provide her only positive emotions, and instead being helped to grow a capacity to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the difference, for me, between desiring to experience wonderful about executing ideally as a flawless caregiver, and instead developing the capacity to accept my own shortcomings in order to do a adequately performed – and understand my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The distinction between my seeking to prevent her crying, and comprehending when she had to sob.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel reduced the desire to press reverse and change our narrative into one where everything goes well. I find faith in my awareness of a skill evolving internally to acknowledge that this is impossible, and to understand that, when I’m busy trying to reschedule a vacation, what I truly require is to weep.