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I hope you had a pleasant summer: my experience was different. On the day we were planning to travel for leisure, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which resulted in our travel plans needed to be cancelled.

From this episode I realized a truth significant, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to experience sadness when things go wrong. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more everyday, gently heartbreaking disappointments that – without the ability to actually acknowledge them – will really weigh us down.

When we were expected to be on holiday but weren't, I kept sensing an urge 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 depressed. And then I would confront the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery required frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a finite opportunity for an pleasant vacation on the Belgian coast. So, no getaway. Just letdown and irritation, hurt and nurturing.

I know worse things can happen, it's just a trip, what a privileged problem to have – I know because I tested that argument too. But what I required was to be honest with myself. In those instances when I was able to stop fighting off the disappointment and we talked about it instead, it felt like we were going through something together. Instead of experiencing sadness and trying to put on a brave face, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and aversion and wrath, which at least felt real. At times, it even was feasible to enjoy our time at home together.

This reminded me of a hope I sometimes notice in my therapy clients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could somehow undo our negative events, like clicking “undo”. But that button only points backwards. Facing the reality that this is not possible and embracing the sorrow and anger for things not turning out how we hoped, rather than a insincere positive spin, can promote a transformation: from avoidance and sadness, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it needs duration – this can be profoundly impactful.

We view depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a suppressing of rage and grief and letdown and happiness and life force, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and freedom.

I have often found myself stuck in this wish to erase events, but my young child is helping me to grow out of it. As a recent parent, I was at times burdened by the astonishing demands of my infant. Not only the nourishing – sometimes for a lengthy period 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 finished the task you were doing. These routine valuable duties among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a reassurance and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What shocked me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the emotional demands.

I had believed my most primary duty as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon realized that it was impossible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her craving could seem endless; my supply could not come fast enough, or it came too fast. And then we needed to change her – but she despised being changed, and cried as if she were plunging into a gloomy abyss of despair. And while sometimes she seemed comforted by the embraces we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were distant from us, that no comfort we gave could aid.

I soon learned that my most important job as a mother was first to survive, and then to assist her process the intense emotions caused by the unattainability of my protecting her from all distress. As she enhanced her skill to take in and digest milk, she also had to develop a capacity to manage her sentiments and her pain when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was suffering, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) irritation, anger, hopelessness, hatred, disappointment, hunger. My job was not to ensure everything was perfect, but to support in creating understanding to her sentimental path of things not working out ideally.

This was the contrast, for her, between experiencing someone who was attempting to provide her only good feelings, and instead being helped to grow a skill to experience all feelings. It was the difference, for me, between wanting to feel excellent about doing a perfect job as a ideal parent, and instead developing the capacity to endure my own shortcomings in order to do a good enough job – and comprehend my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The difference between my trying to stop her crying, and understanding when she required to weep.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel not as strongly the wish to hit “undo” and alter our history into one where things are ideal. I find optimism in my sense of a capacity evolving internally to acknowledge that this is not possible, and to comprehend that, when I’m busy trying to rearrange a trip, what I truly require is to sob.