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I trust your a enjoyable summer: my experience was different. That day we were supposed to be go on holiday, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which caused our vacation arrangements needed to be cancelled.

From this situation I gained insight important, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to acknowledge pain when things take a turn. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more routine, subtly crushing disappointments that – without the ability to actually acknowledge them – will really weigh us down.

When we were expected to be on holiday but were not, I kept feeling a tug 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 didn't improve, just a bit down. And then I would confront the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery involved frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a limited time window for an pleasant vacation on the shores of Belgium. So, no holiday. Just letdown and irritation, hurt and nurturing.

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 wanted was to be honest with myself. In those times when I was able to stop fighting off the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were going through something together. Instead of being down and trying to appear happy, I’ve given myself permission all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and aversion and wrath, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even turned out to appreciate our moments at home together.

This recalled of a wish I sometimes notice in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also seen in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could somehow reverse our unwanted experiences, like hitting a reverse switch. But that option only looks to the past. Acknowledging the reality that this is not possible and embracing the sorrow and anger for things not happening 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 requires patience – this can be transformative.

We think of depression as experiencing negativity – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a pressing down of rage and grief and disappointment and joy and energy, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and liberty.

I have repeatedly found myself stuck in this desire to erase events, but my toddler is helping me to grow out of it. As a recent parent, I was at times overwhelmed by the amazing requirements of my infant. Not only the feeding – sometimes for a lengthy period at a time, and then again under 60 minutes after that – and not only the outfit alterations, and then the changing again before you’ve even completed the change you were changing. These routine valuable duties among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a solace and a tremendous privilege. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What surprised me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the feelings requirements.

I had thought my most primary duty as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon came to realise that it was impossible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her appetite could seem insatiable; my nourishment could not come fast enough, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to change her – but she hated being changed, and cried as if she were falling into a shadowy pit of misery. And while sometimes she seemed comforted by the cuddles we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were lost to us, that no comfort we gave could assist.

I soon realized that my most crucial role as a mother was first to endure, and then to assist her process the powerful sentiments provoked by the infeasibility of my guarding her from all distress. As she enhanced her skill to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to develop a capacity to manage her sentiments and her distress when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was suffering, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, hatred, disappointment, hunger. My job was not to make things go well, but to assist in finding significance to her sentimental path of things not working out ideally.

This was the contrast, for her, between having someone who was trying to give her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being assisted in developing a skill to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the contrast, for me, between desiring to experience great about doing a perfect job as a perfect mother, and instead building the ability to tolerate my own shortcomings in order to do a good enough job – and grasp my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The contrast between my trying to stop her crying, and comprehending when she needed to cry.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel reduced the wish to press reverse and rewrite our story into one where things are ideal. I find faith in my feeling of a ability growing inside me to acknowledge that this is impossible, and to understand that, when I’m focused on striving to reschedule a vacation, what I truly require is to cry.