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I hope you had a enjoyable summer: I did not. The very day we were planning to travel for leisure, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, expecting him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which resulted in our getaway ideas had to be cancelled.

From this experience I gained insight valuable, all over again, about how hard it is for me to experience sadness when things don't work out. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more everyday, quietly devastating disappointments that – unless we can actually experience them – will really weigh us down.

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

I know worse things can happen, it's merely a vacation, what a privileged problem to have – I know because I tried that line too. But what I needed was to be sincere with my feelings. In those instances when I was able to halt battling the disappointment and we talked about 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 unwanted feelings, including but not limited to anger and frustration and hatred and rage, which at least felt real. At times, it even was feasible to appreciate our moments at home together.

This reminded me of a hope I sometimes notice in my therapy clients, and that I have also experienced in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could perhaps erase our difficult moments, like hitting a reverse switch. But that option only points backwards. Confronting 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 enable a shift: from denial and depression, to development and opportunity. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be life-changing.

We think of depression as experiencing negativity – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a repressing of frustration and sorrow and letdown and happiness and life force, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and liberty.

I have often found myself trapped in this wish to erase events, but my little one is helping me to grow out of it. As a recent parent, I was at times burdened by the astonishing demands of my baby. Not only the feeding – sometimes for over an hour at a time, and then again less than an hour after that – and not only the changing, and then the changing again before you’ve even completed the swap you were changing. These everyday important activities among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a comfort and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What shocked me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the psychological needs.

I had assumed my most primary duty as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon realized that it was impossible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her craving could seem endless; my supply could not be produced rapidly, or it came too fast. And then we needed to change her – but she hated being changed, and wept as if she were plunging into a gloomy abyss of despair. And while sometimes she seemed consoled by the hugs we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were separated from us, that nothing we had to offer could assist.

I soon learned that my most crucial role as a mother was first to persevere, and then to help her digest the intense emotions triggered by the unattainability of my protecting her from all discomfort. As she grew her ability to take in and digest milk, she also had to build an ability to manage her sentiments and her distress when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was in pain, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to evolve with her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to guarantee smooth experiences, but to assist in finding significance to her sentimental path of things being less than perfect.

This was the difference, for her, between experiencing someone who was seeking to offer her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being helped to grow a ability to experience all feelings. It was the difference, for me, between aiming to have excellent about performing flawlessly as a ideal parent, and instead developing the capacity to endure my own shortcomings in order to do a adequately performed – and understand my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The distinction between my seeking to prevent her crying, and recognizing when she needed to cry.

Now that we have developed beyond this together, I feel reduced the wish to press reverse and rewrite our story into one where all is perfect. I find hope in my awareness of a ability evolving internally to acknowledge that this is unattainable, and to understand that, when I’m busy trying to rearrange a trip, what I really need is to weep.