Last week, I had to visit the WUTC recording studio, temporarily housed in Lupton Hall on the UTC campus. I’d been emailed detailed directions: where to enter the garage, which space to park in, which door go through to enter the building, which way to turn down the hallway once I was in. I read over the directions many times to be sure they were clear. I even took a screenshot so I could access them easily the morning of my appointment. But I knew my fate: The route would not unfold in the way promised. Also, there would be weeping.

Right off the bat, I could not find the designated parking space, or a door in the garage at all. The door I did finally find, outside the garage, led not to a hallway but to a cafeteria. There I received a second set of directions from a man at a table, which I also could not follow.

At this point, a familiar rage welled up in me—I always get lost when I am trying to get somewhere new, no matter how patient or careful I am—followed by a familiar gloom: it’s depressing, this inability to find my way. Just as the weeping was set to begin, a woman discovered me wandering, and guided me like a child through the maze of hallways to the radio station offices.

I know it’s not completely my fault. I know there’s a glitch baked into my genetic code, the upshot of which is that I will always have a fundamental misunderstanding of space: how it’s arranged, how it relates to other spaces, how to navigate it, even with detailed instructions. It’s called topographical disorientation, which sounds vaguely like an advanced degree you worked hard to get but that has no real earning potential.

My brother has this same glitch in his genetic code. In our most memorable moment of losing our way together, we left my mother’s hospital bedside to grab a bite of dinner two blocks down the street. His wife met us at the restaurant and agreed we could follow her back to the hospital when we were through. Halfway there, however, she remembered a commitment, and peeled off in the opposite direction. Leaderless and alarmed, my brother and I looked at each other in horror.

“What do we do now?” I asked.
“I have no idea,” he said.

Sometime later we finally found the hospital, all lit up and with ample signage, but only by trial and error. If there’s any solace to be found in my disability, it’s knowing my brother also has no idea where he is at any given time.

I’ve written before about my directional challenges. How, when my husband and I were young road trippers, he made me our guide, handing me a McNally book of maps the size of our windshield, expecting that I understood the concept of routes. How he proceeded to ask, every few miles and with maddening calm, what our next turns were, to which my answer was always the same: I don’t know, maybe make a left?

I’ve written about getting lost with my dogs on a golf course I’d walked hundreds of times and calling him in Mexico, where, in a great afront to me at a time when I needed directions, he lay ill and unable to communicate on a doctor’s table in a dirt-floored hut in Mazunte. I’ve written about getting lost in Kansas in a tornado; about my husband’s impromptu geography lessons using napkins to represent cities in the airspace over Montana; and how, at art festivals, he would draw me greatly oversimplified maps that would theoretically guide me from my booth to the Porta Potties—and back again, because I am unable to reverse directions in my head.

At times I have bypassed the genetic explanation for my topographical disorientation in favor of a purely psychological one, pondering whether a sense of direction has less to do with getting around physically than it does with knowing where you’re headed emotionally.

Perhaps the first time I thought this I was in my early forties and on the cusp of a major career overhaul, from mental health therapist to artist/writer. No doubt I was anxious about my direction in life back then, but what comes to mind now is how we recently lost our dog Jada, and how lost and disoriented I’ve felt as a result.

Maybe that’s what was happening that morning in Lupton Hall, when I became so hopelessly adrift in spite of detailed directions that no doubt thousands of people have followed without rage or weeping or the intervention of a personal guide. Maybe this wasn’t a case of bad genetics or emotional uncertainty, but of loss personified. Maybe this was just my body, acting things out.

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Dana Shavin is an award-winning humor columnist for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, and the author of a memoir, The Body Tourist and Finding the World: Thoughts on Life, Love, Home and Dogs, a collection of her most popular columns spanning twenty years. She is the Literary Arts Program Coordinator for the Dalton Creative Arts Guild. More at Danashavin.com. Email her at [email protected].