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My name is Susan
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My name is Susan
  My name is Susan, and I am directionally impaired. There. It feels good to type it out loud, after all these years. I’m finished with denial. I’m embracing my flaws. Not that it’s been much of a secret. For the first year I worked as a reporter in Houston, the other police reporters took turns following me away from each crime scene, honking and shouting and motioning for me to turn around and go the other way. One time both of us got pulled over by a police officer, who thought we were behaving suspiciously. But that’s another story.  I have always known of my impairment. On road trips, I could pull into a gas station on a long, straight road, fill up, pull out going the wrong way, and drive 100 miles before I notice things I’m passing look kind of familiar, only they were on the other side of the road before. I get lost in small office complexes, and have to ask to be led to the exit. I have been known to wander through doctors’ offices, opening wrong doors and excusing myself until I am collected by one of the nurses and taken to the exit.  When we moved here, the first house we rented was on Surfside Beach. We’d lived there a good two weeks, and I’d seen the sun rise several times, when it occurred to me that it was rising over the water. I became agitated. The ocean had to be south, I reasoned, and the sun had no business rising there. Eventually, with the aid of a map, Micheal was able to explain to me that I actually was looking east over the water at the sunrise.  I still have some doubts about the sun and the ocean, to tell you the truth. But my impairment was never a really serious problem until I went to work in Houston, in a job that demanded that you traverse the fourth largest, and No. 1 most confusing, city in the nation. Fast. Key Map® saved me, and I soon learned there was no shame in not knowing my way around Houston. Reporters who grew up there used Key Maps. I used to say I wouldn’t even go to the bathroom in Houston without my Key Map. People thought I was joking. But directionally impaired people have trouble with maps, too. I can’t count the number of times I didn’t look closely enough at the map, and found myself on the right street, closing in on the number I was looking for, when I suddenly ran out of street. Instead, there would be a barricade and a bayou. On the other side of the bayou I could see the scene I needed to be at, and my colleagues, who had looked more closely at their maps.  I can’t count the number of times I thought how much quicker it would have been to wade or swim the damned bayou, than to drive three miles around a bunch of side streets to get to the other side. Those of you familiar with Houston’s bayous know why I never did that. And no, I don’t stop and ask directions. Not in Houston, anyway. You can stop at 17 convenience stores and gas stations before you find someone who’s actually from Houston and knows the spot you’re trying to find—then they’ll pull out a map just like yours.  Taking driving directions from others presents a problem for the directionally impaired as well. I don’t navigate according to points on a compass, I navigate according to landmarks. I know I make a right turn at the big blue building. I have no idea what street I’m turning from, or onto, or in which direction I’m turning, I only know that I turn right at the big blue building. If the city tears the big blue building down one weekend, I’m screwed on Monday. Some people see the world in their heads, all laid out in a particular order, with themselves moving across its surface in direct and meaningful ways. These are the people who always know where north is. The people who give directions in terms of compass points and fractions of miles traveled.  People like me start from ourselves—we are the center of wherever we happen to be and the world is around us, wherever we go and whichever way we’re facing. We’re the ones who say “turn right at the big blue building” and, if our directee clarifies, “You mean west,” reply snippily, “I mean right.” In my experience, the first types are usually men, and the latter, women. I took lots of directions from lots of people when I was a reporter, and it was nearly always men who said things like, “Turn west onto Birch Street, drive 1.3 miles and make a left onto Elm.” The women usually said things like, “There’s this house there that looks kind of like the one in ‘Psycho,’ only it’s not on a hill, and you drive past it and turn left.”  Oddly, I also noticed (in my experience, you understand, this is not a scientific study) that men have problems with “right” and “left” more often than women. Tell them what they just dropped is by their left foot, and chances are they’ll have to think a second about which one is their left foot. Perhaps it would easier to say, “It’s next to your west foot,” but that means I would have to have any idea at all which way is west. When the Houston Police Department moved its headquarters from the squatty old Central Command at 61 Riesner to the highrise on Travis, a whole vista opened up for me—I was able to become lost vertically as well as horizontally, by using the wrong bank of elevators, or entering elevators going the wrong way, or simply by forgetting what floor I was on and which floor I wanted to go to, and thus going up when I should have gone down.  I never got so badly lost in Houston that I missed a scene, or didn’t make it home or back to base camp. But being directionally impaired does spoil any plans you might have for spectacular exits—you can’t huff, stalk or flounce effectively if you can’t find the door, or have to stand in it and study the hall in both directions to try and determine which way you came in. I’ve considered starting a new support group, DI-Anon, but no one would show up for meetings—we’d all be driving around swearing and squinting at the street signs.  |
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