Twenty-four hours into my labour I could be found wearing a pair of XXL hi-vis trousers – the kind worn by overweight construction workers as they repave motorways – walking up and down a small, rat-scuttled stretch of the River Lea, rubbing my nipples like kindling and muttering to my partner in the steady, driving rain.

Six hours into my labour I was eating a chicken bagel on a bouncing birthing ball, watching Dr No with my cousin; 48 hours into my labour, I woke up, light-headed and wet, my waters broken; 51 hours into my labour, I was kneeling in a birthing pool in Homerton hospital, holding a beautiful, howling prune in my arms.

Like cheese sandwiches, the Milibands and snowflakes, no two labours are ever the same. The same mother with the same father in the same room will have utterly different experiences with each child, let alone the differences from woman to woman. You may have a caesarean, you may have an epidural, you may deliver in the bathroom, you may be sent home from the hospital; you may tear, you may take no pain relief, you may be induced, you may deliver early, you may need interventions; you may mistake the early signs, you may not.

But remember this: any labour that results in a healthy mother and a healthy baby is a good labour. Any woman who goes through any form of childbirth is a hero. The blood, the courage, the self-sacrifice, the stamina, the body-shuddering pressure, the fear, the gore: no wonder men had to invent war to soothe their phenomenal sense of inadequacy. Childbirth is an act of bravery, strength and endurance no man will ever know.

When I was pregnant, people seemed eager to tell me horror stories about the women they’d known who had suffered greatly. Those experiences are real and valid and belong to the women who experienced them. But if you are pregnant, or thinking of getting pregnant while reading this, may I simply say: it isn’t always like that. It can be very different.

Let us begin with contractions, for that is probably how things will start. My friend, the author Amy Liptrot, described contractions as “an earthquake going through your body”. It is, for me, a perfect description. I was expecting nuclear period pains – what I got, as my mother did before me, was a feeling like an HGV reversing into my lower back. They were seriously heavy weather and I remember thinking, two days in, as I hung on to the windowsill, in the dark, my partner rubbing my back, my face against the glass, “I am never doing this ever again.”

They were unrelenting – a near-total block on thought, a thick black noise filling every inch of my body, an unshareable weight, a central focus for all the gravity in the universe. But they weren’t exactly painful – just overwhelming and exhausting. Because they kept on coming.

Of course, people do experience incredible pain and if you are induced, your contractions will feel entirely different. I mention mine simply to point out that contractions, like all elements of labour, may not be what you’re expecting. If you possibly can, do not resist them, for they are productive, necessary and they do pass. I found this balloon metaphor quite helpful.

My waters finally broke after two days and two nights of contractions. I felt suddenly light, radiant, made of something like glass – everything was bright and sharp but also shining. As I walked through the hospital I felt each breath rushing in like something white and icy.

I had been sent home twice that previous night, hunkered over like an animal, a towel over my head to block out the world, heaving, groaning, sweating, impatient, throbbing. I had endured contractions lying on a bed, under a screaming fluorescent bulb, two monitor belts across my belly. I was not ready yet. I had to go home. I have never been so disappointed.

When I returned that morning, light-headed, my pyjamas wet, unable to sit, walking like sand, the midwife examined me to discover that I was fully dilated. I have never felt such relief.

“Nell, can you feel anything in your bottom?” the beautiful, clear-faced midwife asked me as I lay naked on a mattress beside the window. Did she mean the contractions? This pulsating heaving pressure in my lower back? “Do you mean my pooing bum?” I asked, bleary-eyed. She did. I felt nothing until, dragging my way into the toilet for a wee, I suddenly felt the urge. I walked out of the toilet, into my birthing room, naked, sweat-soaked, eyes half closed. “My bum,” I announced, “is now involved.”

Pushing out a baby, the final stage, was – and please believe me when I say this – wonderful. After two days of contractions – a feeling that I was getting nowhere, the almost unbearable wait punctuated by the unrelenting crashing waves of pressure – to realise that I was finally going to evacuate was brilliant. Suddenly, I didn’t care where I was, who was with me, what happened. I could have pushed that baby out in the middle of a Lidl car park.

As I knelt in the pool, gripping my partner by the fists, following the breathing directed by the midwife, I knew somehow what it took. This pushing was familiar, innate. Not unlike a shit, of course, but somehow phenomenal in its scale. I could actually feel the limbs, the corners, the structure of my baby moving down through my body.

My limbs were merely ribbons hanging off this giant, pulsating tube. I was a volcano, a child, a rigid blank in the centre of a moving world. I felt a pop in my vulva. I felt with grim acceptance that I had torn my vagina into a doily; I had been too eager and ripped it apart. “That was just the seal around the baby’s head,” my angel midwife said, from somewhere behind my arse.

I pushed. I felt a head and then it slipped away. I asked my partner if the baby was out. He managed, somehow, to keep a straight face. It was not. Then, finally, out it came, in two enormous heaves that turned my face puce: a Francis Bacon painting of hot purple contortion so furious I had to dip it in the water around my body for relief.

Childbirth feels like everything to everyone. Wolves gnawing at your entrails, blue medical hairnets, a thundering ocean, white noise, sandwiches in plastic packets, teeth-chattering nerves, the ripping apart of your pelvis like tectonic plates, the click and drip of machinery, lightning down your spine, the pale blank hum of a hospital light, the onion sweat of animals, panic, darkness, exhaustion, a mist that becomes hail, leaving your body, believing in your body, a beleaguered body, a body pulled from your body.

There is no good labour and no bad labour. Anyone who births a child, by whatever means, deserves our admiration and our support. They should feel proud; that’s what childbirth should feel like. Pride.

• Nell Frizzell is a freelance journalist for the Guardian, Vice, Buzzfeed, the Independent, Vogue, i-D and Time Out