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I trust your a enjoyable summer: I did not. That day we were scheduled to go on holiday, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, expecting him to have urgent but routine surgery, which resulted in our travel plans needed to be cancelled.

From this situation I gained insight valuable, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to experience sadness when things take a turn. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more common, quietly devastating disappointments that – if we don't actually acknowledge them – will significantly depress us.

When we were meant to be on holiday but were not, 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 down. And then I would confront the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a short period for an enjoyable break on the Belgian coast. So, no holiday. Just letdown and irritation, suffering and attention.

I know worse things can happen, it’s only a holiday, 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 moments 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 being down and trying to appear happy, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to anger and frustration and loathing and fury, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even turned out to value our days at home together.

This reminded me of a hope 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. Facing the reality that this is not possible and allowing the sorrow and anger for things not happening how we expected, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can promote a transformation: from avoidance and sadness, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it needs duration – this can be transformative.

We think of depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a suppressing of rage and grief and disappointment and joy and energy, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but acknowledging every sentiment, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and liberty.

I have often found myself stuck in this wish to click “undo”, but my toddler is assisting me in moving past it. As a recent parent, I was at times swamped by the incredible needs of my baby. Not only the nursing – sometimes for over an hour at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the changing, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even finished the swap you were changing. These everyday important activities among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a reassurance and a tremendous privilege. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What shocked me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the emotional demands.

I had thought my most important job as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon understood that it was unfeasible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her appetite could seem insatiable; my milk could not arrive quickly, or it came too fast. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she hated being changed, and sobbed as if she were plunging into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed soothed 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 realized that my most crucial role as a mother was first to endure, and then to support her in managing the powerful sentiments provoked by the impossibility of my protecting her from all discomfort. As she developed her capacity to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to build an ability to process her feelings and her distress when the supply was insufficient, or when she was in pain, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to develop alongside her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to make things go well, but to support in creating understanding to her emotional experience of things not working out ideally.

This was the distinction, for her, between being with someone who was seeking to offer her only good feelings, and instead being helped to grow a capacity to experience all feelings. It was the distinction, for me, between desiring to experience great about doing a perfect job as a flawless caregiver, and instead developing the capacity to endure my own imperfections in order to do a sufficiently well – and grasp my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The contrast between my attempting to halt her crying, and recognizing when she needed to cry.

Now that we have developed beyond this together, I feel reduced the desire to click erase and alter our history into one where everything goes well. I find faith in my feeling of a capacity evolving internally to recognise that this is impossible, and to comprehend that, when I’m busy trying to reschedule a vacation, what I truly require is to sob.