The following is a choice exerpt from my second book, And It Was All Your Fault: Unraveling the Inner Psychology of Depression, How It Begins, and What Cures It. The full book can be found here.

My Personal Encounter with Depression

One summer off from high school, when I was a sexually frustrated adolescent of age fifteen, I found my first girlfriend in a small rural hamlet in upstate New York. It was the summer dacha of my two grandparents, who invited me there for a few weeks to spend time with them, and to escape the blazing New York City heat, which my parents also urged me to do. I was rather fond of my grandparents, and most of my friends left for camp that summer, so I decided to accept their invitation, and relax there for an indefinite time until I grew tired of it.

I had almost no peers in the area: a small community of bungalows populated by old and middle-aged Russians, some of them with their children no older than age five. One dimwitted boy around my age would come for the weekends, and we’d play videogames together, but that was the extent of it. Only a few houses down, however, there were two girls, cousins, who were also spending the summer there, living with just the ancient grandmother of the eldest, who rarely if ever ventured outside of her bedroom, where she appeared to do nothing but watch TV.

I wasn’t very attracted to the older cousin, who was one or two years my elder, and (in a small bit of irony) had herself had a long history of depression, and a few failed suicide attempts under her belt. From what I could tell, she didn’t especially like me either. But the younger cousin, let’s call her Y, certainly did catch my attention. She was quite attractive, physically well-developed, with large breasts on an athletic body, and—what was perhaps most important to my past self—she was exactly my age.

The three of us—Y, her older cousin, and I—began to hang out together almost every day. At some point during that time, Y started to like me, and I noticed. We played games together in which I would try my best to get a rise out of her: to startle her, or spray her with water, or seemingly accidentally touch her body. She responded to this very positively and even appeared to enjoy it.

In my interior life, I soon grew very excited at the prospect of winning Y over to become my girlfriend. She would be my first, and it would certainly give me something to brag to my friends about. Some of my friends had already had girlfriends, and some had already had sex. I was enormously eager to join that club, and to get ahead of those friends who had not yet had girlfriends or lost their virginity—something that I planned to hold over them as a grand superiority. This was, and had for a long time been, a major goal of mine.

One afternoon, I decided to take the next step, and put my arm around Y while the three of us sat on their couch watching TV—the ancient grandmother hidden safely away in her bedroom. Y didn’t protest this action, and instead drew closer to me in response. My heart raced in my chest.

Several days after that, I finally gathered the courage to kiss her. She didn’t protest this act either, and reciprocated the kiss eagerly. It was sealed. We spent the next couple weeks walking hand in hand, making out, and watching TV in each other’s arms, mostly away from the older cousin. I enjoyed all this immensely; it was a new and extremely exciting time in my life.

Very notably, we did all of this without talking much. Whenever we did talk, it was largely idle and trivial conversation. We literally never, not once, explicitly discussed anything about our relationship. I remember one time wanting to tell her, explicitly, that I was her boyfriend, but then found myself too anxious to say it. Anything on the topic was only briefly mentioned or alluded to in the buffering presence of Y’s cousin, who still hung out with us from time to time, but increasingly less often.

Y and I would meet one another at some point every day, and then decide to go for a walk in the forest, or watch television, or go to some other place where we’d invariably make out and cuddle, but without once speaking of any intention to do so or making any verbal reference to it during. It all appeared implicitly understood between us.

(In a similar vein, I also avoided looking at Y’s face whenever I could: she had a large, Jewish nose that I didn’t find especially pleasant to look at.)

Although the time we spent together only encompassed a portion of each day, I had no thoughts to spare for anything else. I completely neglected every book I intended to read, and spent most of my time looking forward to when I’d see Y again—all the time planning and contemplating what was the best way, place, and time to go about having sex with her. I felt that I’d already shied away from several good opportunities to do so (times when my hand was halfway down her panties, but I was lacking the nerve to go further), and finally steeled my courage to make a wholehearted attempt at it. It had already been nearly a month since we started seeing each other, and I thought that the time had to be now or never.

One night, while we were making out and cuddling together, she was laying on top of me on her bed, I decided to take things further, and made an attempt to unhook her bra and remove her shirt. This time, she quickly recoiled, and clearly rejected my advances. I calmly accepted that this simply wasn’t the right time—and attached no special importance to it—since we continued to French kiss and cuddle the rest of the night as if nothing had happened. It was only when I kissed her goodbye that night, and her lips felt a little different, a little stiffer, a little less responsive, that I suspected that something might indeed be wrong. But then I decided that she was just flustered, and thought nothing further of it.

The next day, however, Y didn’t answer my calls and, for the first day in two or three weeks, we didn’t see each other. The same thing happened the next couple of days, and when I tried to go see her in person, she’d tell me through her doorway something to the effect of being busy, shut the door, and retreat back into her house. Finally, when I intercepted her in the road and implored her to discuss what was happening, she replied that she had no desire to talk to me and forcefully ignored me the rest of the time. This was especially effective because of the presence of her older cousin, who seemed to have formed an alliance with Y against me.

I was both puzzled and angered by this. I spent full days obsessing over it, forming different theories about what change might have occurred in Y that made her react to me in this way. My first guess was that it was caused by my trying to have sex with her that night. I also suspected that her older cousin might have convinced her that I was despicable in some way. My best hypothesis was a combination of the two. I also thought Y might simply be on her period, which was making her act in an unexpected manner.

In any case, when my attempts to find out the cause and remedy the situation failed, I decided that trying to pursue this any further would be a pathetic and demeaning action on my part. The whole time our flimsy relationship lasted, I took pride in the notion that I didn’t feel much of anything toward Y; and I’d often tell myself that I meant more to her than she did to me. I certainly enjoyed our time together, but it was mainly the process of making out and groping her that I enjoyed; Y was simply the person I had the opportunity to do it with. I also took pleasure in just the idea that I had a girlfriend. Her presence, I’d frequently tell myself, was what was important to me at the time, the girl herself wasn’t. I felt that any great effort to win her back would be admitting the opposite, and decided that I could easily find another girl if I returned to the city.

So, finally acting on my pride and anger, I abandoned the situation entirely. I asked my parents to bring me back to the city, they obliged, and I never saw Y again.

A short while after returning home, I suddenly felt my life to be purposeless. I found myself oddly unable to derive pleasure from my favorite activities, and had no idea why this was happening to me. I’d hang out with my best friends, most of whom had already returned from camp, and go to the movies and play handball with them, all the while feeling it empty, pointless, and bereft of enjoyment. I yearned for the exciting process of cultivating and furthering a romantic relationship with the final goal of sex. Compared to that, anything I had the opportunity to do while at home seemed utterly meaningless to me.

I didn’t find another girl, and looked back with reproach and self-criticism at each time I might have squandered my chance to have sex with Y—as well as the awkward, dishonest, or abrasive ways I sometimes behaved toward her. I often thought back with stinging reproach at the one night I tried to have sex with her, and fretted over the fact that I could’ve gone about it a lot smarter. I thought about all the ways I could’ve repaired the problem, the things I could’ve said to Y or her cousin to clear matters up, or that it might have been only a matter of waiting out Y’s period, and not leaving so impulsively and abruptly. All this was thoroughly infused with reproach emotion.

Every time I thought about my desires for sex and romance, which was almost always, my thoughts eventually came back to Y. And every time I thought about Y, I’d invariably feel a cascade of regret, sadness, and self-reproach, and then force all those thoughts out of my mind.

As the summer progressed, and most of my friends again left the city, I began having a very hard time simply leaving my house. I did force myself to do so every single day, and went to a nearby park to play handball until sundown, but each time required an enormous effort. Playing handball every day, sometimes all day, I became remarkably good at the game, but experienced almost no pleasure from it. I did have some fleeting minutes of enjoyment, when I was with friends, or during especially intense games at the park, when all my attention was absorbed in something external to me, but that enjoyment would fade almost instantly the second I became conscious of it, and saw that it was basically purposeless.

There were, however, a couple prospects of finding another girlfriend during this period—a girl I met at the park or saw in my neighborhood—about which I’d get extremely excited for several days at a time. But these never materialized into anything, and I’d sink once again into dejection and anhedonia.

What I experienced was, clearly, the typical picture of a mild depression. This lasted for about two months, during which time I periodically scoured the internet in an attempt to find news about what Y was doing and what made her become so harshly disposed toward me. Finally, after two months of searching, I came upon a short conversation between Y and her older cousin on an online forum I knew they both frequented, and also what their usernames were. It was a brief exchange, of no more than a few sentences, in which they clearly referred to me, and denounced me as a typical guy who only wanted sex.

With this, my depression was cured instantly, and with no residual side effects. I had received confirmation—a definite closure—that it was indeed due to my sexual advances that Y turned on me so abruptly. And that absolved me of all self-reproach. The opportunity to have sex and lose my virginity, which I thought I so foolishly squandered, had been a dead end the whole time. Y never intended to have sex with me, no matter what way I had gone about it. I thus achieved a genuine reevaluation of my loss: the reevaluation that there really was nothing to lose in the first place, and that I got everything out of the relationship that I possibly could have. This gave me a great joy, and I promptly returned to being my usual, witty, cheery self.

I have never experienced depression since.

This instant curing of my depression perfectly demonstrates the power of reevaluation. And the astounding thing is that its effect was purely psychological. Nothing about my situation actually changed. I still didn’t have a girlfriend, and I was still a virgin. Only now, I saw this to be unavoidable, and that it wasn’t my own fault.

It is these kinds of sudden reappraisals that psychologists haven’t been able to pin down as the true cause of some people’s spontaneous recoveries from depression. And that is what gives me such confidence in the efficacy of introspection to answer the questions academic psychology hasn’t been able to.

You can read the full book, And It Was All Your Fault: Unraveling the Inner Psychology of Depression, How It Begins, and What Cures It, here.

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