THE NARRATIVE ARC

Why Do I Get Lost Around the Corner?

Who knew there was a name for my problem?

Photo by Evan Dennis on Unsplash

I struggle to try to figure out what went wrong, but my thoughts are racing and I can’t concentrate. I feel overwhelmed. I have a knot in my stomach, and my heart is beginning to pound.

I’ve apparently made a wrong turn, and nothing looks familiar.

I’m returning from a place I’ve never been to before and foolishly hadn’t turned on Google Maps. But it’s broad daylight, and I’m in my own car on a pleasant country road barely 10 miles from my home. I might as well be in another state for all the difference it makes in how I feel.

I used to think I just had “a terrible sense of direction,” as my husband, who has a superb sense of direction, always says. But that description never seemed to convey the near panic I typically feel at the first sign of not being 100% sure where I am.

I was excited to learn that there’s actually a name for my affliction: developmental topographical disorientation, or DTD. (Sounds so much better than “terrible sense of direction,” don’t you think?) It was reassuring to discover that I might even just be borderline.

Last year I heard a fascinating interview on NPR with someone who knows a lot about the subject: Christopher Kemp, a scientist and science writer who suffers from the condition way worse than I do. He had published an engrossing book on the subject, Dark and Magical Places: The Neuroscience of Navigation. For much of the interview Kemp seemed to be describing me.

He offered personal examples of his getting hopelessly lost a block from home, in familiar stores, and so on. I’ve never quite done that, though I did once get lost coming out of the metro station a few blocks from our Paris apartment. (In my defense, we had just moved there a week before.)

Kemp described a set of online tests that measure how well individuals process spatial information. He said that the effort made him sweat bullets, even during the tests he’d passed; his wife, on the other hand, who sounds a lot like my husband, not only excelled at them but actually enjoyed the challenge.

When listeners called in to the show, Kemp’s responses and clarifications further confirmed my tendency toward DTD. One caller suggested that people who get lost a lot probably learn strategies for finding their way out of such situations. No way, I retort to the voice on the radio.

“Not at all,” was his response. Yes! He proceeded to describe how he experienced a being-lost scenario. The description was eerily similar to my opening paragraph here when all ability to reason goes out the (car) window. Exactly, I’m saying now, vigorously nodding my head as I jot down the name of his book.

Remember that wrong turn I thought I’d made on my way home? Evidently, I hadn’t really — I just thought I had — so I wasn’t even lost yet. But I got myself increasingly lost as I drove back and forth in search of something familiar and couldn’t get the GPS set up again.

I should probably mention that my earliest memory happens to be about getting lost around age 3 in Macy’s Department Store in New York City. I was with my mother, either hiding behind or simply hidden by the mountain-like clothes rack. When my mother turned around and didn’t see me, she probably looked for me frantically and called my name. Either I didn’t hear her or mischievously ignored her.

I wandered around a bit until a nice saleswoman saw me and took me to a broadcasting booth or wherever they’d made an announcement about a lost child. I honestly don’t remember being panicked or crying. It was no doubt far worse for my mom.

But I suppose being lost as a preschooler in the world’s largest department store could scar a kid for life.

I really don’t recall having any trouble as a child, but my hometown might have had something to do with that. I’ve heard that growing up somewhere with streets on a grid pattern, such as midtown Manhattan, evidently allows people like me to go through early life without developing any personal navigation skills.

Every little kid in New York City knows that the higher the numbered street, the farther uptown (north) it is. When you get a little older, you learn that Fifth Avenue divides the avenues east from west. I easily learned the sequence heading east: Madison, Park, Lexington, Third, Second (my block) First. When you go farther east, it gets a bit funky, but I mostly didn’t need to worry about that.

Come to think of it, even after our family moved out of Manhattan when I was in elementary school, our new neighborhood in Queens was on a comforting quasi-grid.

Of course, millions of people grow up in New York or in similar settings, and most of them survive with a perfectly competent sense of direction.

For many years, my dreams have had two recurring themes: getting lost — or, more accurately, searching for a specific location — and looking for a public toilet. The two themes often dovetail.

Is my dream life related to my DTD tendencies? To getting lost in Macy’s?

I doubt it’s coincidental.

Years ago, my friend Barbara, who has a similar navigational shortcoming, convinced us to get a Garmin GPS for the car before we all had better ones on our smartphones. I returned the favor by later telling her about DTD. I’ve been a believer in GPS ever since.

Well, at least I was until I heard about people who blindly followed some GPS instructions, sometimes with amusing results and sometimes not. Ever hear of the concept known as death by GPS? It even has its own Wikipedia entry.

Oh boy. Now what? Rand McNally is no help for people like me.

Postscript: One day last week, my husband dropped me off right in front of a medical building I’d been to many times before. As he drove away, he stared in amazement at the rearview mirror as I walked right past the prominent main entrance and just kept going.