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I hope you had a pleasant summer: my experience was different. On the day we were supposed to be take a vacation, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have urgent but routine surgery, which resulted in our vacation arrangements needed to be cancelled.

From this episode I learned something 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 everyday, subtly crushing disappointments that – without the ability to actually feel them – will truly burden us.

When we were expected to be on holiday but could not be, I kept experiencing a pull towards seeking optimism: “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 bump up against the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery required frequent uncomfortable wound care, and there is a short period for an relaxing trip on the Belgian coast. So, no holiday. Just letdown and irritation, pain and care.

I know worse things can happen, it's merely a vacation, 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 moments 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 feeling depressed and trying to appear happy, I’ve given myself permission all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment 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 desire I sometimes notice in my counseling individuals, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could perhaps erase our difficult moments, like pressing a reset button. But that arrow only looks to the past. Facing the reality that this is unattainable and allowing the pain and fury for things not working out how we anticipated, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can enable a shift: from rejection and low mood, to development and opportunity. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be life-changing.

We think of depression as experiencing negativity – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a repressing of rage and grief and disappointment and joy and vitality, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of honest emotional expression and release.

I have frequently found myself stuck in this urge to click “undo”, but my toddler is assisting me in moving past it. As a first-time mom, I was at times overwhelmed 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 diaper swaps, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even completed the task you were changing. These routine valuable duties among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a comfort and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What shocked me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the feelings requirements.

I had believed my most primary duty as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon came to realise that it was not possible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her hunger could seem endless; my milk could not arrive quickly, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to change her – but she disliked being changed, and sobbed as if she were descending into a shadowy pit of misery. And while sometimes she seemed comforted by the cuddles we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were separated from us, that no comfort we gave could help.

I soon learned that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to persevere, and then to help her digest the overwhelming feelings triggered by the impossibility of my shielding her from all distress. As she grew her ability to take in and digest milk, she also had to build an ability to process her feelings and her distress when the supply was insufficient, or when she was hurting, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to develop alongside her (and my) irritation, anger, hopelessness, hatred, disappointment, hunger. My job was not to ensure everything was perfect, but to help bring meaning to her emotional experience of things not working out ideally.

This was the distinction, for her, between experiencing someone who was trying to give her only good feelings, and instead being supported in building a skill to feel every emotion. It was the difference, for me, between wanting to feel excellent about doing a perfect job as a perfect mother, and instead cultivating the skill to endure my own imperfections in order to do a adequately performed – and understand my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The contrast between my attempting to halt her crying, and comprehending when she needed to cry.

Now that we have developed beyond this together, I feel less keenly the urge to click erase and alter our history into one where everything goes well. I find faith in my sense of a ability developing within to understand that this is not possible, and to realize that, when I’m focused on striving to rearrange a trip, what I truly require is to sob.