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I trust your a enjoyable summer: my experience was different. The very day we were scheduled to travel for leisure, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have prompt but common surgery, which caused our travel plans had to be cancelled.

From this experience I learned something significant, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to acknowledge pain when things don't work out. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more everyday, subtly crushing disappointments that – if we don't actually acknowledge them – will truly burden us.

When we were supposed to be on holiday but were not, 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 never felt better, just a bit depressed. And then I would confront the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery required frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a limited time window for an enjoyable break on the shores of Belgium. So, no vacation. Just discontent and annoyance, pain and care.

I know graver situations can happen, it's just a trip, such a fortunate concern to have – I know because I tried that line too. But what I needed was to be truthful to myself. In those instances when I was able to cease resisting the disappointment and we discussed it instead, it felt like we were facing it as a team. Instead of being down and trying to appear happy, I’ve granted myself all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and loathing and fury, which at least felt real. At times, it even became possible to enjoy our time at home together.

This recalled of a wish I sometimes see in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could perhaps erase our difficult moments, like pressing a reset button. But that arrow only goes in reverse. Confronting the reality that this is unattainable and allowing the sorrow and anger for things not turning out how we anticipated, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can promote a transformation: from rejection and low mood, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be life-changing.

We view depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a repressing of rage and grief and disappointment and joy and vitality, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and liberty.

I have frequently found myself stuck in this desire to erase events, but my young child is helping me to grow out of it. As a recent parent, I was at times overwhelmed by the astonishing demands of my newborn. Not only the nursing – sometimes for more than 60 minutes at a time, and then again under 60 minutes after that – and not only the changing, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even ended the swap you were handling. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a comfort and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What astounded me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the emotional demands.

I had thought my most primary duty as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon realized that it was unfeasible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her appetite could seem insatiable; my milk could not be produced rapidly, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to change her – but she hated being changed, and sobbed as if she were falling into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed consoled by the embraces we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were separated from us, that no comfort we gave could aid.

I soon learned that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to persevere, and then to assist her process the powerful sentiments caused by the infeasibility of my guarding her from all distress. As she enhanced her skill to consume and process milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to digest her emotions and her pain when the supply was insufficient, or when she was suffering, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to ensure everything was perfect, but to support in creating understanding to her emotional experience of things not working out ideally.

This was the contrast, for her, between having someone who was seeking to offer her only positive emotions, and instead being supported in building a capacity to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the contrast, for me, between desiring to experience great about doing a perfect job as a ideal parent, and instead building the ability to accept my own shortcomings in order to do a adequately performed – and understand 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 evolved past this together, I feel less keenly the urge to hit “undo” and change our narrative into one where everything goes well. I find faith in my sense of a capacity growing inside me to understand that this is not possible, and to understand that, when I’m focused on striving to reschedule a vacation, what I actually want is to cry.