Wile E. Karen, Spatial Genius

In which I learn that I lost and then rediscovered a curious skill

“Which way?” Ra asks. My daughter is driving today, but only I know how to get where we’re going. I’ve been there before, they have not.

“Just keep heading south,” I say, fluttering a hand dismissively in a southerly direction.

“This way?” they point straight ahead.

“Yes,” I snap. South, for fuck sake. South is south!

“Why are you like this?” Ra whines. “You know I don’t know directions like you do.”

I slide down in the seat, crossing my arms over my chest. And before I know it, I’m thinking judgmental thoughts I don’t want to be thinking. Who doesn’t know which way south is? Aren’t the cardinal directions elementary school stuff?

Turns out they are, yes, but people generally have a much worse sense of direction than most of us assume. In other words, if you don’t know which way’s south… you’re in good company.

I went down a rabbit hole recently and discovered that human navigation typically splits into two categories: egocentric (self-centered) and allocentric (world-centered). Most people rely on egocentric route-following using landmarks. (“Turn left by the gas station.”) But people with high spatial intelligence are allocentric. They rely on a sort of god’s-eye view of the landscape.

I’m an allocentric navigator. Ra? Not so much.

A researcher named Nora Newcombe and the folks at the Hegarty Spatial Thinking Lab have a name for what I do: “survey mapping.” It’s not just a good sense of direction; it’s more like carrying a fixed mental grid of the world that doesn’t shift when your body does. The map stays put; you move through it.

What’s even wilder is what linguist Lera Boroditsky found studying people whose languages don’t use words like “left” and “right,” only absolute directions, like north and south. Those people develop what amounts to an internal compass so finely tuned it operates below conscious thought. They don’t calculate where north is. They just... know. The same way you know which way is up.

The catch is that this background operating system can go offline.

* * * *

I’m 25. I’ve just moved to Ashwaubenon, a little suburb southeast of Green Bay, Wisconsin, to follow my fiancé, Peter, who just took an exciting new job there. But he asks me to get my own separate apartment, which seems strange.

“I’m not ready for you to move in yet,” he tells me. He has to get things settled with Patty, he says. I’ve been told she’s his ex girlfriend, and that she suddenly showed up on his doorstep with a baby saying it was his. Peter has embraced his infant son, Brandon, and I’m going along for the ride.

“If Patty finds out about you,” Peter warns me, “I don’t know what she’ll do. She’s psycho. She’ll take Brandon and run to get even with me. I’ll never see my son again.”

“But why would she be upset about me?” I ask. “If you’re broken up, then you’re both free to be with other people, right?”

Peter shakes his head. “You don’t know her,” he says. “In her mind, I broke her heart, and if she can’t have me, no one can. I can’t let her know about you until we have some sort of custody order.”

I accept what he’s saying—I have no choice—but it still feels off. Just as Ashwaubenon does. For some reason, although I never get lost—in fact, I find it almost impossible to get lost even when I’m trying to—every time I get onto the freeway with the intent of heading south, I end up going north and having to turn around when I realize I’ve screwed up. I’m baffled. Why does this little city have me so disoriented?

And then, only a month or so after I move into my own apartment, Patty moves in with Peter. It’s just temporary, he tells me. Her mom kicked her and the baby out of their house. Patty has nowhere to go. He has to provide a place for Brandon, doesn’t he? And just as soon as he gets some money set aside to file for custody rights, he’ll send her packing. After all, she’s making a nearly two-hour commute, one way, to go to work in Milwaukee every day. Over time, that’s going to wear her down, right? And then she’ll go.

But she stays. And I’m forced to stay hidden. I’ll never quite understand why I bought into it all, except that Peter could be incredibly convincing. When I think about my naivety now, I’m ashamed I didn’t cut Peter loose then and there.

Things with the Peter and Patty situation continue to escalate. Patty often spends the week down in West Allis, staying with her mom to avoid the commute.

“If she’s just staying with her mom all week anyhow, then what was the point of her mom kicking her out?” I ask.

Peter says that Patty’s mom views her staying as a houseguest as different from, and somehow more palatable than, her actually living there.

So, during the week, I stay with Peter. And that means navigating around Patty’s things. Her clothing strewn everywhere. Her hygiene products all over the bathroom. Peter calls her “hurricane Patty,” because she leaves his place a mess.

And during the week, I clean it. I don’t want to see Peter living like that, do I? And what of Brandon, the baby I’d met many times? Peter brings him by when he takes Patty’s car to gas it up for her commute. Do I want to see Brandon living in squalor? Of course not.

So I live separately from my fiancé. I clean up after his baby mamma. (Or so I thought. I would later learn that Peter was the hurricane.) And I continue to turn north when I want to go south.

* * * *

I would have to write a novella to recount all of the things that happened in Green Bay in detail, so I’ll summarize instead.

Patty stayed for many months. Autumn turned to winter turned to spring. I stayed with Peter during the week and cleaned around Patty’s things while Peter reassured me he slept on the couch every night despite the absence of blankets or pillows.

(“I put them away every morning.” OK, but you put those things away and nothing else? Really?)

One night, I walked past Peter’s apartment, as I often did, and saw candlelight flickering in the bedroom window.

(“You don’t get it. The woman loves candles. She literally lights candles every night.” I walk by almost every night, and I haven’t seen candles before.)

And then, while cleaning, I found a Rough Rider condom wrapper on the floor on Peter’s side of the bed. I was on birth control. I believed I was in a committed relationship. We didn’t use condoms.

(“She forced me to! She was trying to seduce me. You don’t get it—she’s literally crazy!” Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Why is he doing this to me? I trusted him!)

The condom incident led me to buy a pack of straight razors and sit in my bathtub holding a blade poised over my wrist for over an hour while the water turned cold before crawling out, drying off, and lying in bed cold and demoralized.

And I kept turning north when I wanted to go south.

Weeks later, I contacted an attorney. I asked her about custody law. I explained Peter’s situation and his “Patty the psycho” narrative. Looking back, I’m sure the attorney saw me as pathetic. But to my shock, Peter actually followed through. He filed the suit, evicted Patty (who would prove to be pretty “psycho” in the future, even forcing me to file a restraining order against her), and I moved in.

It was around that time, when I stopped cleaning up after my own humiliation and took some action, that I stopped turning north when I meant to go south and started what would prove to be a very long journey toward discovering myself for the first time.

* * * *

I married Peter, convinced I could make him into the person I needed him to be instead of the man he was, someone who lied and cheated his way through life.

We had a son we named Ian. Not long after he was born, Patty discovered Peter was not only living with me, but we were married and had a child together. Peter had convinced Patty somehow that he was living with her, and the reason he was never home—he slept at our apartment nearly every single night, although not all—was due to work travel. But he was a new car sales manager, and Patty couldn’t quite bring herself to believe that someone who sold cars needed to travel constantly. She grew suspicious and eventually tracked down Peter’s real home address… and me.

When Ian was just a toddler, my grandpa—my person, someone who always made me feel safe and loved—died in his sleep of a massive heart attack. A few months later, my grandma, who now lived alone, fell on her concrete stoop and hit her head. She lay there in the cold until the neighbors found her and helped her inside. I convinced Peter that we should move in with my 78-year-old grandmother. She welcomed the company.

We lived with Grandma for a couple of years. Enough time for me to have another child, our daughter Shayla (who now uses the gender-neutral nickname I gave them when they were a teenager, Ra.) Peter and Grandma, now in her 80s, fought sometimes. I couldn’t stomach the idea of my husband raising his voice to my grandmother, and it became a source from which much conflict in our relationship flowed.

Although it was 1997 and the paint was still drying on this new technology called the Internet, Peter managed to meet women online and recruit them into sexual relationships. But of course, they all lived a few hundred miles away. Two in Minnesota. One in Missouri. Peter called them on the house landline—this was well before everyone had a cell phone—and ran up an enormous phone bill. He discovered Grandma’s credit card lying out one day and used it to pay off his delinquent account. Grandma asked my mom to review this weird charge on her bill, and all signs pointed back to Peter. Mom confronted me about it, and I immediately kicked him out of my grandparents’ home.

I wish I could say that I’d found my true north by then. But although I was back home where the freeway system was familiar and my internal map was flawless, my emotional compass still glitched. When I realized that not only would I be financially responsible for raising two children alone but that Peter would almost certainly get joint custody, I invited him back into my life. Living with Peter at Grandma’s was no longer an option, so we rented half of a duplex.

Life went on. There were some OK years, particularly when Peter opted to take medication for what his counselor labeled “complex PTSD” but privately told me was probably borderline personality disorder—something then considered mostly untreatable.

But there were many abjectly awful years, too. I continued to slog through the emotional turmoil and Peter’s abuse, which sometimes got physical. I knew that even though I no longer wanted to be with Peter, I was fused to him, locked in a dysfunctional dance until my children were grown and I could leave.

* * * *

It’s 2023. I’ve long since left Peter and moved to the Pacific Northwest. Although my son Ian opted to finish college in Wisconsin, Ra lives with me. We’re content. I’ve bought a house, Ra pays rent and contributes to bills, and we’re doing OK, just the two of us.

We’ve finished eating dinner and the TV is on, but we’re not really watching. Some random thing I’d learned that day pops into my head.

“Did you know that some people can’t visualize?”

“Yeah,” Ra says. We watch a lot of the same content on TikTok, which is where I first heard about this trait called “aphantasia.”

“There’s a test that asks you to picture an apple, and then say what color it is, as if you’re actually seeing something,” I say. “But how can that be effective? People are going to just make stuff up, right? If you ask me what color my apple is, I’ll just pick a color at random and say that’s it. What does that test even tell people?”

“Um…”

“Like, when someone tells you to picture an apple, you don’t see an actual picture of an apple. That’s ridiculous!”

“Mom—”

“We just think about the idea of—”

“I see an apple, mother.”

I quirk an eyebrow. “Do you mean ‘see’ an apple? As in, you see a real image of an apple?”

“Yes.”

I’m stunned. Almost speechless. What?

“You’re saying you actually see something? In your head?”

“Mom, I can watch a full-blown movie in my head if I want to.”

“And most people can do that?”

“As far as I know, yeah.”

“What the—?”

“Mother,” my daughter smirks. They not only love watching me make an intellectual discovery, but they’re also a little smug about having realized something about me mere seconds before I did. “You have aphantasia.”

* * * *

I’ve been putting the pieces together ever since.

Aphantasia, the inability (or diminished ability) to visualize, affects from 1 to 4 percent of the population. But people like me, with a total inability to visualize, make up 0.8 percent. (Although those numbers are likely skewed, because many people are just like I was—they don’t realize that most people actually can visualize.)

When asked to “picture” something in my mind’s eye, I always assumed that “picture” was a metaphor for “think about conceptually.” It was a revelation to realize that I lacked an ability most people had.

Then the aphantasia discovery started making other parts of my life make sense. Like my astonishingly good sense of direction. Just like a blind person compensates by strengthening other senses, my own brain had strengthened my spatial reasoning abilities. When I learned about the connections researchers were drawing between aphants (a term for people with aphantasia) and heightened abilities like spatial reasoning, something clicked for me.

A few years ago, I discovered a curious lifelong ability I’ve had: I can tell you which cardinal direction the head of my bed faced in every home I’ve ever lived in. Instantly. With barely a thought.

The house on Lake Nagawicka? West when I slept downstairs, north when I moved to the upstairs room.

And I’m not pulling those directions out of thin air, even though it seems like it. I’m not making them up. I just know them. The same thing is true even of temporary lodging. That Airbnb in White Salmon? East. My brother’s place in Colorado? Also East.

When my friend bought a new house and we stood in her backyard surveying her soon-to-be garden for the first time, she tried to gauge how much sunlight the spot would get.

“I wonder what direction we’re facing,” she mused.

“Northeast,” I said.

“You think?” she looked up at the gray Washington sky. I could see her doing the mental calculations in her head. Last time I was here, the sun came in the spare room window, so…

“I know,” I said, shrugging. “I’ve always had a good sense of direction.”

Aphantasia likely gifted me with incredible spatial reasoning skills. I know where my body is in space. I don’t have to spin a mental map in my head (because hey, I can’t!) to get “northeast,” I just consult my inner survey schematics for an instant answer.

Thinking about my spatial reasoning skills made me remember a long-ago test result that had baffled me at the time. I’d talked my counselor into administering an IQ test. (I suspect I just wanted to prove I was smart despite all of the naive things I was doing to survive a relationship with Peter.) My IQ score was in the “highly gifted” range (and believe me when I say that doesn’t feel like a flex given how often I struggle to use that brainpower), but my spatial reasoning score was 170. For context, that subtest is scored the same way IQ is—100 is average, 130 is gifted. The test doesn’t have much room above 170. It just kind of... runs out of scale. (When I asked AI to contextualize that for me, it said: “A 170 score isn’t just ‘good at puzzles’—it means your brain is essentially a dedicated spatial workstation.”)

Just call me Wile E. Karen, Spatial Genius. (The competition will ultimately be good for Wile E. Coyote, I’m sure. Not to mention the ACME company.)

* * * *

Last night, I was questioning AI about something that piqued my curiosity (because I believe that’s one use case AI’s good for) and the conversation turned to aphantasia and spatial reasoning. I ended up remembering that period in my life back in Green Bay where I kept going north when I wanted to go south.

And then it hit me.

“Could stress cause my internal compass to break?” I asked.

And the answer came back: Yes. Research shows that stress can dampen cognition, and spatial reasoning skills are no exception. High stress. Trauma. Survival mode. When the brain kicks into fight-or-flight, it can override the navigational circuitry entirely, leaving some people with a disorienting sense of being untethered from the grid they’ve always trusted. Spatially lost in a way that has nothing to do with geography.

Getting on that ramp the wrong way was a literal manifestation of my life at the time: I was moving in a direction that my internal “truth” knew was wrong.

And now we’re back in the car, with Ra behind the wheel. I’m in Washington state, nearly 3,000 miles away from where Peter lives now. I’m safe. And even though this isn’t where I grew up, I’m home.

“Just keep going south,” I reiterate to Ra, glancing in their direction. They mutter something about wishing they’d turned on GPS instead of using Mom-PS, which is fair. But I know what it feels like when my compass breaks. And now, I know what it takes to get it back. South is south, north is north, and for the first time in a long time, I trust myself to know the way.

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