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I hope you had a good summer: mine was not. On the day we were scheduled to travel for leisure, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which meant our travel plans needed to be cancelled.

From this experience I realized a truth significant, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to acknowledge pain when things take a turn. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more everyday, quietly devastating disappointments that – without the ability to actually experience them – will really weigh us down.

When we were supposed 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 bump up against the reality that this holiday had truly vanished: my husband’s surgery involved frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a limited time window for an relaxing trip on the Belgium's beaches. So, no getaway. Just disappointment and frustration, hurt and nurturing.

I know graver situations can happen, it's just a trip, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I tested that argument too. But what I wanted was to be sincere with my feelings. In those times when I was able to halt battling the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were going through something together. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to appear happy, I’ve given myself permission all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to anger and frustration and loathing and fury, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even was feasible to enjoy our time at home together.

This brought to mind of a desire I sometimes observe in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could somehow reverse our unwanted experiences, like pressing a reset button. But that button only points backwards. Acknowledging the reality that this is unattainable and embracing the pain and fury for things not working out how we hoped, rather than a insincere positive spin, can enable a shift: from rejection and low mood, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it needs duration – this can be profoundly impactful.

We think of depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a repressing of anger and sadness and frustration and delight and vitality, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but acknowledging every sentiment, a kind of honest emotional expression and freedom.

I have often found myself caught in this desire to click “undo”, but my little one is supporting my evolution. As a new mother, I was at times overwhelmed by the astonishing demands of my newborn. Not only the feeding – sometimes for more than 60 minutes at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the changing, and then the changing again before you’ve even completed the swap you were doing. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a comfort and a tremendous privilege. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What surprised me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the emotional demands.

I had believed my most important job as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon realized that it was not possible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her appetite could seem endless; my nourishment could not arrive quickly, or it came too fast. And then we needed to alter her clothes – but she disliked being changed, and cried as if she were descending into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed soothed by the embraces we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were distant from us, that no comfort we gave could aid.

I soon realized that my most important job as a mother was first to endure, and then to assist her process the overwhelming feelings provoked by the infeasibility of my protecting her from all discomfort. As she enhanced her skill to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to develop a capacity to digest her emotions and her suffering when the supply was insufficient, or when she was suffering, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to develop alongside her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to ensure everything was perfect, but to help bring meaning to her sentimental path of things not working out ideally.

This was the difference, for her, between having someone who was seeking to offer her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being assisted in developing a skill to experience all feelings. It was the contrast, for me, between desiring to experience wonderful about performing flawlessly as a perfect mother, and instead cultivating the skill to tolerate my own imperfections in order to do a adequately performed – and comprehend my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The difference between my attempting to halt her crying, and understanding when she required to weep.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel less keenly the urge to press reverse and change our narrative into one where all is perfect. I find faith in my awareness of a skill evolving internally to acknowledge that this is unattainable, and to realize that, when I’m busy trying to reschedule a vacation, what I really need is to weep.