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I trust your a pleasant summer: mine was not. The very day we were scheduled to take a vacation, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have urgent but routine surgery, which caused our vacation arrangements needed to be cancelled.

From this experience I gained insight important, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to feel bad when things don't work out. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more common, gently heartbreaking disappointments that – unless we can actually feel them – will significantly depress us.

When we were meant to be on holiday but weren't, 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 didn't improve, just a bit depressed. And then I would confront the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery required frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a finite opportunity for an pleasant vacation on the Belgian coast. So, no vacation. Just discontent and annoyance, pain and care.

I know more serious issues can happen, it's merely a vacation, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I wanted was to be honest with myself. In those moments when I was able to cease resisting the disappointment and we talked about it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of being down and trying to smile, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and loathing and fury, 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 therapy clients, and that I have also seen in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could somehow undo our negative events, like pressing a reset button. But that arrow only points backwards. Acknowledging the reality that this is impossible and embracing the sorrow and anger for things not working out how we hoped, rather than a false optimism, can enable a shift: from rejection and low mood, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it needs duration – this can be life-changing.

We consider depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a suppressing of frustration and sorrow and frustration and delight and energy, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and freedom.

I have repeatedly found myself stuck in this urge to reverse things, but my little one is helping me to grow out of it. As a new mother, I was at times swamped by the incredible needs of my infant. Not only the nursing – 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 doing it once more before you’ve even completed the task you were doing. These routine valuable duties among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a solace and a significant blessing. 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 important job as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon came to realise that it was not possible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her craving could seem endless; my supply could not be produced rapidly, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to change her – but she hated being changed, and wept as if she were plunging into a shadowy pit of misery. 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 aid.

I soon realized that my most important job as a mother was first to persevere, and then to assist her process the intense emotions triggered by the unattainability of my guarding her from all distress. As she grew her ability to consume and process milk, she also had to develop a capacity to digest her emotions and her suffering when the milk didn’t come, or when she was hurting, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to develop alongside her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, hatred, disappointment, hunger. 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 experiencing someone who was attempting to provide her only good feelings, and instead being supported in building a capacity to experience all feelings. It was the distinction, for me, between aiming to have great about doing a perfect job as a perfect mother, and instead cultivating the skill to accept my own imperfections in order to do a sufficiently well – and understand my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The difference between my trying to stop her crying, and comprehending when she had to sob.

Now that we have developed beyond this together, I feel not as strongly the wish to click erase and alter our history into one where things are ideal. I find hope in my sense of a capacity growing inside me to recognise that this is not possible, and to comprehend that, when I’m occupied with attempting to rebook a holiday, what I actually want is to sob.