Embracing Life's Unexpected Setbacks: Why You Cannot Simply Click 'Undo'

I trust your a enjoyable summer: my experience was different. On the day we were supposed to be take a vacation, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have urgent but routine surgery, which resulted in our travel plans were forced to be cancelled.

From this situation I realized a truth significant, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to feel bad when things take a turn. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more routine, quietly devastating disappointments that – if we don't actually experience them – will significantly depress us.

When we were supposed 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 remained low, just a bit blue. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery involved frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a finite opportunity for an pleasant vacation on the Belgium's beaches. So, no vacation. Just discontent and annoyance, pain and care.

I know worse things can happen, it's just a trip, what a privileged problem to have – I know because I tried that line too. But what I wanted was to be sincere with my feelings. In those instances 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 being down and trying to appear happy, I’ve granted myself 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 turned out to appreciate our moments at home together.

This brought to mind of a wish I sometimes observe in my counseling individuals, and that I have also experienced in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could somehow reverse our unwanted experiences, like hitting a reverse switch. But that arrow only looks to the past. Confronting the reality that this is not possible and accepting the pain and fury for things not working out how we expected, 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 profoundly impactful.

We consider depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a pressing down of anger and sadness and letdown and happiness and energy, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and freedom.

I have often found myself trapped in this urge to reverse things, but my young child is helping me to grow out of it. As a recent parent, I was at times burdened by the incredible needs of my infant. Not only the nourishing – sometimes for over an hour at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the outfit alterations, and then the repeating the process before you’ve even completed the task you were doing. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – are a reassurance and a tremendous privilege. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What shocked me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the feelings requirements.

I had thought my most important job as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon understood that it was not possible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her appetite could seem endless; my milk could not come fast enough, or it came too fast. And then we needed to change her – but she hated being changed, and cried as if she were descending into a gloomy abyss of despair. And while sometimes she seemed comforted by the cuddles we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were lost to us, that nothing we had to offer could help.

I soon realized that my most important job as a mother was first to survive, and then to help her digest the intense emotions triggered by the unattainability of my protecting her from all unease. As she developed her capacity to take in and digest milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to manage her sentiments and her suffering when the supply was insufficient, or when she was in pain, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to evolve with her (and my) irritation, anger, hopelessness, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to make things go well, but to assist in finding significance to her feelings journey of things being less than perfect.

This was the distinction, for her, between being with someone who was seeking to offer her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being assisted in developing a capacity to experience all feelings. It was the distinction, for me, between desiring to experience excellent about performing flawlessly as a ideal parent, and instead cultivating the skill to endure my own imperfections in order to do a good enough job – and understand my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The distinction between my trying to stop her crying, and understanding when she had to sob.

Now that we have developed beyond this together, I feel less keenly the urge to press reverse and change our narrative into one where things are ideal. I find faith in my sense of a skill evolving internally to acknowledge that this is not possible, and to realize that, when I’m occupied with attempting to reschedule a vacation, what I truly require is to cry.