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I hope you had a good summer: my experience was different. That day we were scheduled to go on holiday, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have prompt but common surgery, which caused our getaway ideas had to be cancelled.

From this experience I learned something valuable, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to acknowledge pain when things go wrong. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more common, subtly crushing disappointments that – unless we can actually experience them – will truly burden us.

When we were expected to be on holiday but were not, 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 never felt better, just a bit blue. And then I would confront the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery involved frequent uncomfortable wound care, and there is a short period for an enjoyable break on the shores of Belgium. So, no vacation. Just discontent and annoyance, suffering and attention.

I know worse things can happen, it's merely a vacation, what a privileged problem to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I required was to be truthful to myself. In those times 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 smile, I’ve granted myself all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and loathing and fury, which at least felt real. At times, it even was feasible to appreciate our moments at home together.

This recalled of a hope I sometimes notice in my therapy clients, and that I have also seen in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could somehow erase our difficult moments, like clicking “undo”. But that button only points backwards. Facing the reality that this is impossible and accepting the sorrow and anger for things not working out how we expected, rather than a insincere positive spin, can enable a shift: from avoidance and sadness, to development and opportunity. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be transformative.

We view depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a pressing down of frustration and sorrow and letdown and happiness and energy, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but acknowledging every sentiment, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and liberty.

I have repeatedly found myself stuck in this desire to click “undo”, but my young child is helping me to grow out of it. As a new mother, I was at times swamped by the amazing requirements of my infant. 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 changing, and then the changing again before you’ve even finished the swap you were doing. These routine valuable duties among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a comfort and a tremendous privilege. 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 important job as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon realized that it was not possible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her appetite could seem endless; my milk could not be produced rapidly, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to change her – but she disliked being changed, and sobbed 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 lost to us, that no comfort we gave could help.

I soon learned that my most important job as a mother was first to persevere, and then to assist her process the intense emotions triggered by the impossibility of my shielding her from all distress. As she developed her capacity to consume and process milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to manage her sentiments and her suffering when the supply was insufficient, or when she was in pain, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to evolve with her (and my) irritation, anger, hopelessness, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to ensure everything was perfect, but to assist in finding significance to her sentimental path of things being less than perfect.

This was the difference, for her, between being with someone who was seeking to offer her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being assisted in developing a ability to feel every emotion. It was the contrast, for me, between desiring to experience excellent about doing a perfect job as a flawless caregiver, and instead building the ability to endure my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a sufficiently well – and understand my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The contrast between my attempting to halt her crying, and understanding when she needed to cry.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel reduced the desire to press reverse and alter our history into one where things are ideal. I find faith in my sense of a skill evolving internally to acknowledge that this is impossible, and to understand that, when I’m occupied with attempting to reschedule a vacation, what I really need is to weep.