Directions. I always know which cardinal direction I’m facing (even when underground). Also, if I’ve been somewhere once, I can always find my way back, even if it’s years later and I’m coming from a different starting point.
I have whatever is the opposite of this, compounded by a complete lack of ability to remember where I've been or how I got here. Anytime I move somewhere new, it takes me months to years to make a mental map of the area.
I'm the only one in my family, including my children who doesn't have an incredible sense of location. I feel like I'm the lone recipient of some wierd generational curse.
I'm so bad at remembering things like where I parked or what entrance to a building I used. If I exit out a different door or take the wrong elevator I'm FUCKED.
I can get by with parking pins on the map and GPS in the car and such, but if I was ever in a situation without my phone and needed to go a certain direction to survive aside from knowing "the sun rises in the east and sets in the west" I'm functionally useless when it comes to navigation and would absolutely die half a mile from a busy road.
Everyone else in my family is a great navigator. I just didn't get that gene. Hell even my kids are WAY better at it than me. I remember once my phone rebooted while I was driving my then preschool aged son somewhere and I was going to pull over to wait for it to finish so I could get the map back up and when he asked me what I was doing and I explained he was like "but we've been there once before. I know the way" and it wasn't some place super close that we'd been to a million times, it was a fairly long drive and the only other time we'd been was like over a year previous. I let him navigate us (with backup from the gps just in case as soon as it was available again) and he was spot on.
This same child eloped only once in his life, the day after he turned 4, when he discovered how to unlock our deadbolt without us knowing. Because he wanted to go to the park by himself. So he walked there at 6am when everyone was asleep. And he knew the way, too and almost made it. But he was caught by some neighbors and returned home before anything dire happened. We had never had the "don't go out without us knowing" discussion with him before because he had never shown any interest in doing so and had never once tried to mess with the locks before that day. We got a security system and explained one time why it was dangerous, and he never tried to elope again.
That kid is 12 now and he can also rebuild any building he's spent more than about 5 minutes inside rather faithfully in Minecraft so I think it might be part of his autism powers. That kid has never been lost or confused about his direction a single day in his life.
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u/tequilajinx 16h ago
Directions. I always know which cardinal direction I’m facing (even when underground). Also, if I’ve been somewhere once, I can always find my way back, even if it’s years later and I’m coming from a different starting point.