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I wish you enjoyed a good summer: I did not. The very day we were scheduled to go on holiday, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have urgent but routine surgery, which resulted in our vacation arrangements were forced 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 major catastrophes, but the more common, subtly crushing disappointments that – if we don't actually feel them – will really weigh us down.

When we were meant to be on holiday but were not, I kept sensing an urge towards seeking optimism: “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 face the reality that this holiday had truly vanished: my husband’s surgery involved frequent uncomfortable wound care, and there is a short period for an pleasant vacation on the Belgian coast. So, no getaway. Just disappointment and frustration, pain and care.

I know worse things can happen, it's just a trip, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I tried that line too. But what I required was to be sincere with my feelings. In those moments when I was able to halt battling the disappointment and we discussed it instead, it felt like we were facing it as a team. Instead of being down and trying to put on a brave face, I’ve given myself permission all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and hatred and rage, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even became possible to appreciate our moments at home together.

This brought to mind of a hope I sometimes notice in my therapy clients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could perhaps reverse our unwanted experiences, like hitting a reverse switch. But that option only looks to the past. Confronting the reality that this is not possible and allowing the sorrow and anger for things not turning out how we hoped, rather than a false optimism, 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 view depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a pressing down of rage and grief and disappointment and joy and life force, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of honest emotional expression and release.

I have frequently found myself trapped in this wish to reverse things, but my young child is helping me to grow out of it. As a recent parent, I was at times swamped by the incredible needs of my baby. 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 repeating the process before you’ve even finished the task you were doing. These routine valuable duties among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a comfort and a tremendous privilege. Though they’re also, at moments, persistent and tiring. What shocked me the most – aside from the sleep deprivation – were the psychological needs.

I had believed my most key role as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon understood that it was unfeasible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her hunger could seem unmeetable; my supply could not arrive quickly, or it came too fast. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she hated being changed, and sobbed as if she were descending 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 distant from us, that no solution we provided could help.

I soon discovered that my most crucial role as a mother was first to survive, and then to help her digest the overwhelming feelings caused by the infeasibility of my guarding her from all distress. As she grew her ability to take in and digest milk, she also had to build an ability to process her feelings and her pain when the milk didn’t come, or when she was in pain, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to evolve with her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to make things go well, but to help bring meaning to her emotional experience of things not working out ideally.

This was the difference, for her, between having someone who was trying to give her only positive emotions, and instead being helped to grow a skill to feel every emotion. It was the difference, for me, between wanting to feel great about performing flawlessly as a ideal parent, and instead cultivating the skill to tolerate my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a sufficiently well – and grasp my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The contrast between my seeking to prevent her crying, and comprehending when she needed to cry.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel reduced the desire to hit “undo” and change our narrative into one where everything goes well. I find faith in my feeling of a ability developing within to understand that this is unattainable, and to comprehend that, when I’m busy trying to rebook a holiday, what I actually want is to cry.