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I wish you enjoyed a enjoyable summer: I did not. On the day we were scheduled to take a vacation, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which resulted in our vacation arrangements were forced to be cancelled.

From this situation I learned something important, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to feel bad when things don't work out. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more routine, gently heartbreaking disappointments that – without the ability to actually experience them – will really weigh us down.

When we were expected 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 never felt better, just a bit down. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery required frequent uncomfortable wound care, and there is a short period for an pleasant vacation on the Belgium's beaches. So, no vacation. Just letdown and irritation, pain and care.

I know graver situations can happen, it's merely a vacation, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I tested that argument too. But what I wanted was to be honest with myself. In those moments when I was able to halt battling the disappointment and we talked about it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of experiencing sadness and trying to smile, I’ve granted myself all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and hatred and rage, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even was feasible to value our days at home together.

This reminded me of a hope 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 button only goes in reverse. Facing the reality that this is not possible and allowing the pain and fury for things not working out how we anticipated, rather than a insincere positive spin, can promote a transformation: from rejection and low mood, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it needs duration – this can be life-changing.

We consider depression as experiencing negativity – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a pressing down of anger and sadness and letdown and happiness and vitality, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but acknowledging every sentiment, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and release.

I have repeatedly found myself caught in this wish to reverse things, but my young child is assisting me in moving past it. As a first-time mom, I was at times burdened by the astonishing demands of my infant. Not only the nursing – sometimes for over an hour at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the diaper swaps, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even finished the task you were doing. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a comfort and a tremendous privilege. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What surprised me the most – aside from the sleep deprivation – were the emotional demands.

I had assumed my most primary duty as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon realized that it was unfeasible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her craving could seem unmeetable; my supply could not come fast enough, or it came too fast. And then we needed to alter her clothes – but she hated being changed, and sobbed as if she were descending into a shadowy pit of misery. And while sometimes she seemed soothed by the hugs we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were distant from us, that no comfort we gave could aid.

I soon discovered that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to persevere, and then to help her digest the intense emotions caused by the unattainability of my protecting her from all distress. As she enhanced her skill to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to build an ability to digest her emotions and her distress when the milk didn’t come, 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 ensure everything was perfect, but to assist in finding significance to her emotional experience of things being less than perfect.

This was the contrast, for her, between being with someone who was trying to give her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being assisted in developing a ability to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the distinction, for me, between desiring to experience great about doing a perfect job as a flawless caregiver, and instead cultivating the skill to accept my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a adequately performed – and understand my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The contrast between my seeking to prevent her crying, and understanding when she needed to cry.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel reduced the wish to hit “undo” and change our narrative into one where things are ideal. I find optimism in my feeling of a skill growing inside me to acknowledge that this is impossible, and to understand that, when I’m occupied with attempting to rebook a holiday, what I actually want is to sob.