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I trust your a enjoyable 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 necessary yet standard surgery, which meant our getaway ideas had to be cancelled.

From this situation I learned something significant, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to feel bad when things go wrong. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more common, quietly devastating disappointments that – without the ability to actually experience them – will significantly depress us.

When we were expected to be on holiday but could not be, 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 blue. And then I would face the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery required frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a limited time window for an enjoyable break on the Belgium's beaches. So, no vacation. Just discontent and annoyance, suffering and attention.

I know graver situations can happen, it's merely a vacation, such a fortunate concern to have – I know because I tried that line too. But what I needed was to be honest with myself. In those instances when I was able to cease resisting the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were facing it as a team. Instead of experiencing sadness and trying to put on a brave face, I’ve granted myself all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to anger and frustration and loathing and fury, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even was feasible to value our days at home together.

This brought to mind of a wish I sometimes see in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also seen in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could perhaps erase our difficult moments, like hitting a reverse switch. But that button only goes in reverse. Acknowledging the reality that this is not possible and accepting the grief and rage for things not happening how we expected, rather than a insincere positive spin, can enable a shift: from rejection and low mood, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be life-changing.

We view depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a repressing of rage and grief and letdown and happiness and vitality, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and release.

I have often found myself stuck in this desire to erase events, but my toddler is supporting my evolution. As a first-time mom, I was at times swamped by the astonishing demands of my baby. Not only the nourishing – sometimes for more than 60 minutes at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the changing, and then the changing again before you’ve even completed the task you were doing. These routine valuable duties among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a reassurance and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, persistent and tiring. What surprised me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the psychological needs.

I had believed my most key role as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon came to realise that it was not possible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her appetite could seem endless; my supply could not be produced rapidly, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to change her – but she disliked being changed, and wept as if she were plunging 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 solution we provided could help.

I soon discovered that my most important job as a mother was first to survive, and then to help her digest the intense emotions provoked by the infeasibility of my guarding her from all unease. As she developed her capacity to consume and process milk, she also had to build an ability to digest her emotions and her distress when the supply was insufficient, or when she was suffering, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to develop alongside her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to ensure everything was perfect, but to support in creating understanding to her feelings journey of things not going so well.

This was the contrast, for her, between having someone who was attempting to provide her only positive emotions, and instead being assisted in developing a capacity to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the difference, for me, between aiming to have wonderful about performing flawlessly as a perfect mother, and instead developing the capacity to endure my own shortcomings in order to do a adequately performed – and grasp my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The difference between my trying to stop her crying, and comprehending when she required to weep.

Now that we have developed beyond this together, I feel not as strongly the desire to click erase and alter our history into one where everything goes well. I find hope in my feeling of a ability evolving internally 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.