13 Things You Should Know About Friends With A Terrible Sense Of Direction

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I am terrible at directions. I often walk out of a store and have no idea which way I came from and usually end up going in the completely wrong way. I’m too embarrassed to admit this, so I end up making believe that I intended to go in that direction, at least for a little while. I waste a lot of time getting lost. If you’ve ever met anyone who can’t get from Point A to Point B to save her life, here’s a little insight into their train of thought.

  1. When we walk out of an elevator, there is a 100% chance we don’t know whether to go left, right, straight or back into the elevator because we’re on the wrong floor.
  2. We often mistake one street, park and landmark for another and will go in a certain direction for miles based on this false assumption.
  3. When visiting a friend’s home for the first time, don’t be surprised if we look for the bathroom in a closet and then have no idea where the front door is that we just entered your home in.
  4. Driving with us is hit or miss depending on how reliable our driving app is working that day or if a GPS leads us to a ditch. We take every single thing one of these devices tells us as if it’s the law. If it led us off a mountain, we would follow it there. Be prepared to get lost.
  5. We get very defensive when you make fun of our inability to know where we are and where we are going. It’s not something we can control; it’s a mapping deficiency in our brain. Chatting with people distracts us and our minds are way more interested in the people around us than where we are going. We often get lost in conversation and end up in an entirely different place than we ever mean to be. It’s far more admirable to be present with those around us than to remember how to get to a certain location.
  6. Just because we’ve been going to a certain place numerous times over the course of several years does not mean we will ever be 100% certain on how to get there. Don’t make fun of us for looking up the directions or not knowing to turn a certain corner to get there.
  7. We could get lost in a Target store. Calling to tell us to meet you somewhere is pointless since we won’t know how to get to where you are.
  8. While searching for the bathroom in a restaurant, it’s not unusual if we accidentally wander into the kitchen or basement.
  9. We may get so lost on the way to meeting up with you that we’ll pretend that we meant to go that way just to avoid the shame of explaining how bad our sense of direction is.
  10. We’re not pretending to be ignorant about which street to turn on to get to our favorite diner. We honestly don’t know. Please don’t shame us.
  11. We know that some of our friends have minds like steel traps when it comes to directions and remembering how to get somewhere. They may have visited someone’s home 15 years earlier and can retrace the route just by feeling it out.  We are seriously impressed, but this will never be us. We give you a gold star for your human GPS skills.
  12. If we don’t pay attention, we’ll walk blocks past the place we were intending to go. People will notice us suddenly jolted back into the moment. Yes, we’re often those people who miss their stop on the subway, bus or train. Forgive us.
  13. We keep things interesting with our directionally challenged abilities. You’ll need to guide us and pay attention if you want to get from Point A to Point B without taking the very scenic route. That said, we’ll be great company along the way.  
image – halfrain