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I hope you had a enjoyable summer: I did not. That day we were scheduled to take a vacation, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which meant our travel plans needed to be cancelled.

From this episode I learned something important, all over again, about how hard it is for me to acknowledge pain when things take a turn. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more common, subtly crushing disappointments that – if we don't actually experience them – will significantly depress us.

When we were meant to be on holiday but could not be, 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 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 enjoyable break on the shores of Belgium. So, no vacation. Just letdown and irritation, 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 truthful to myself. In those moments when I was able to stop fighting off the disappointment and we talked about it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of experiencing sadness and trying to smile, I’ve given myself permission all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to anger and frustration and aversion and wrath, which at least felt real. At times, it even was feasible to enjoy our time at home together.

This recalled of a hope I sometimes notice in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also experienced in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could in some way reverse our unwanted experiences, like pressing a reset button. But that button only looks to the past. Acknowledging the reality that this is unattainable and accepting the pain and fury for things not working out how we anticipated, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can enable a shift: from avoidance and sadness, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it needs duration – this can be life-changing.

We view depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a repressing of rage and grief and letdown and happiness and vitality, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and release.

I have often found myself trapped in this wish to erase events, but my young child is supporting my evolution. As a first-time mom, I was at times burdened by the amazing requirements of my baby. Not only the feeding – sometimes for a lengthy period at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the diaper swaps, and then the repeating the process before you’ve even completed the swap you were doing. These everyday important activities among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – are a comfort and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What shocked me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the psychological needs.

I had believed my most important job as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon came to realise that it was unfeasible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her hunger could seem unmeetable; my milk could not arrive quickly, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to change her – but she disliked being changed, and sobbed as if she were falling into a shadowy pit of misery. And while sometimes she seemed soothed by the hugs we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were separated from us, that nothing we had to offer could help.

I soon discovered that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to survive, and then to help her digest the powerful sentiments caused by the impossibility of my protecting her from all distress. As she grew her ability to consume and process milk, she also had to develop a capacity to process her feelings and her pain when the supply was insufficient, or when she was in pain, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to evolve with her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to guarantee smooth experiences, but to assist in finding significance to her feelings journey of things not working out ideally.

This was the contrast, for her, between having someone who was seeking to offer her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being assisted in developing a skill to feel every emotion. It was the contrast, for me, between wanting to feel great about executing ideally as a perfect mother, and instead developing the capacity to tolerate my own shortcomings in order to do a sufficiently well – and grasp my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The difference between my attempting to halt her crying, and understanding when she had to sob.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel less keenly the wish to hit “undo” and rewrite our story into one where things are ideal. I find faith in my feeling of a skill evolving internally to understand that this is not possible, and to comprehend that, when I’m focused on striving to rearrange a trip, what I truly require is to weep.