Being directionally challenged makes my life interesting
To say I was thrilled the first time my father let me drive the family car by myself would be an understatement.
True, it was only to the grocery store 4 blocks from my grandparents’ house, but this was the moment I had waited for ever since I was old enough to know what a car was. I was finally able to sit in the driver’s seat and take control of the car without hearing “Slow down!” or “Didn’t you see that other car coming? You almost had an accident!” or my favorite, “Quick! Get out of here before the cops see you and think you’re drunk!” I could finally feel like the grown up I thought I was.
I cranked up the radio, rolled down the window and basked in my newfound independence. I made it to the grocery store without any problems. Basking in my success, I drove home. I almost didn’t see the car coming straight for me.
Wait a minute. A car coming straight for me? What’s that guy doing in my lane? Shouldn’t he be in the other lane? Just in time, I understood. I was the one in the wrong lane! How could I be? I knew I was in the U.S. and should therefore be driving on the right side of the road. That should make sense.
The problem is, I am a self-described directionally challenged person. I am 24 years old, and I still have difficulty with the concept of left and right. Whenever I get behind the wheel of a car, I have to spend a few minutes figuring out which side of the road to drive on.
I was often frustrated as a child when my mother got after me for putting the fork on the wrong side of the plate. When I was in London, I honestly didn’t notice the cars were driving on the opposite side of the street until my boyfriend pointed it out to me. (To my credit, I was weirded out by people driving from what I considered the passenger seat. I hoped I wouldn’t see a dog or a small child sitting in the British passenger seat, because I would have been mildly freaked out by that. Mildly freaked out enough to call the police about a potential road hazard, that is.)
Normally, having this little brain oddity is not a problem. However, being a performing arts person, I like to be onstage. I don’t want to know how many directors I have driven insane. I am not in the mood for a guilt trip today.
But if left and right are confusing, I’m sure you can imagine what it feels to have stage right, stage left, upstage and downstage suddenly thrown at me. It must be written in some director’s manual somewhere that an actor must never simply walk through the door, sit down on the couch and say a few lines. That just wouldn’t do.
The actor must enter stage right, cross upstage, quickly glance toward stage right, take two steps downstage, then another 4 stage left … you get the idea. To a normal person, that’s confusing. To a directionally challenged person, you may as well have said, “Build a spaceship which can run on a fuel made from an inorganic compound containing carrots.” Or something equally bizarre. You’d get similar results.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go figure out where the fork goes on the dinner table. I believe my mother may be paying me a visit.
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