24: Symptoms, Causes, Treatments, Diagnoses. Or vice-versa

Sometimes things that look like opposites are really symptoms of the same thing. Look at eating disorders. You see that an anorexic is trying to starve herself. You find out that this is because she is obsessively trying to lose weight. You see an overeater stuffing herself. But if you were to conclude that she is obsessively trying to GAIN weight, you’d be wrong. In fact they are both obsessed with an ideal image of slender beauty, but their obsession takes opposite forms.

Sometimes things that look the same are opposites. Someone with high blood sugar shouldn’t eat sugar. This makes sense. It would also make sense to conclude that someone with low blood sugar SHOULD eat sugar. But that is not the case. Some of the symptoms of having too much sugar in your blood are very similar to some of the symptoms of not having enough sugar in your blood. The causes are opposite, but the effects are much the same.

Sometimes we think someone needs more of something when they actually need less, and vice versa.

It would make sense that if you overeat you need someone to tell you about the advantages of being slim. It would make sense that low blood sugar means you need to eat more sugar. But sometimes the things that make a lot of sense are simply false.

Keep this one in mind. It's not like I've hit some deep hidden truth here, but a whole lot of what I learned during my pilgrimage was how the causes, effects and remedies I've been seeing in my life made all the sense in the world, but were still mistaken. If nothing else, the pilgrimage showed me some more areas of my life in which I had been mistaking the poison for the cure, the illness for the therapy, and the cause for the effect.

I needed to reverse some of my thoughts, but since the problem was that the thoughts were already reversed, I guess you could say that I needed a process of "unreversal". I don't think that word normally exists, but I invite you to use it. It rolls satisfyingly off the tongue.