“TURN LEFT! TURN LEFT! NO…YOUR OTHER LEFT!”

That would be me. The ditz behind the wheel who doesn’t know right from left.

Okay, so I’m not that bad. But almost.

I suffer from what I call directional dyslexia. It runs in my family, so maybe I was born with it, or maybe it’s due to the vehicular trauma I suffered when I was eight.

Picture this: Little 8-year-old me on a tractor ride at a local county fair. The “tractors” were little put-put mobiles with a maximum speed of maybe 5 miles per hour. The course was a circular area ringed with hay bales. How could anyone, even a kid, screw that up, right? Well, somehow I did. I turned the steering wheel in the wrong direction and – bam! – I was breaking through the hay bales, heading in the direction of the adjacent parking lot. When the ride operator caught up with me in the parking lot, his face was red and he was cursing like it was grand theft auto. “You think this is funny? What’s wrong with you, kid?” he yelled. He obviously thought it was a prank. I was mortified.

The shame of that experience lingers to this day, and apparently I didn’t learn my lesson. Before the advent of GPS I spent more time being lost than going in the right direction. Even with GPS, there’s a 30% chance I’ll turn too soon or take the wrong freeway exit.

On one memorable occasion (pre-GPS) I didn’t realize I was going in the wrong direction until I saw I was crossing a state line–into another state than the one where my destination was located.

But when one must find one’s way, one does. (Or those of us who suffer from directional dyslexia would be permanently lost.) A few years ago, my daughter, Mary, and I took a trip to Paris. Mary speaks fluent French, so she was able to act as translator, but she’s as directionally challenged as I—even more so, if that’s possible. To make matters worse, we were without GPS, as I foolishly had not purchased an international phone plan. So there we were wandering the streets of Paris with me as the pilot, clutching a physical map (yep, they still make ‘em), and Mary as my co-pilot, stopping passersby to ask for directions in French whenever my map-reading failed to get us where we wanted to go.

Needless to say, we were lost most of the time. And you know what? It made for a much better trip, as it turned out. I came up with the perfect term for it: pleasantly lost. Being “pleasantly lost” has it benefits. We saw sights, and stumbled on cafes and shops, we wouldn’t have known about otherwise. We met interesting people we wouldn’t have met had Mary not stopped passersby to ask for directions. Who knew there was a Musee de Carnavale in Paris? Or that the coffee shop with the best coffee and croissants I enjoyed while I was in Paris was one street over from where we were staying?

In life, as when you’re traveling on foot or behind the wheel of moving vehicle, you sometimes find the best bits going down a road you hadn’t intended to travel. Like with my mind, which comes up with the best plot twists for whatever novel I’m working on when I allow it to wander—it led to the twist involving a missing earring in my first novel GARDEN OF LIES.) So, while I have yet to fully embrace my directional dyslexia, I’ve found a way to live with it. No longer a source of sweaty, high anxiety, it’s become a source of curiosity (when I’m not rushing to get to an appointment or to catch a plane). “Where is this road taking me? What will I see along the way? Where will I end up?”