[Badger]

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I had this problem until I was 15 or so. Not this bad, but I could never remember which was left or right. I guess I never learnt it young. My cure came while I was watching a kid's show with a friend's brother. "Left is the hand that makes an L when you hold it up". It was easy to visualize after that and a couple of weeks later it was natural. Watching myself think about it now, deciding left from right still requires the invoking of visual or kinesthetic memory from one of the times I've decided between left and right (such as visualizing a car turning or imagining myself writing. But it's instantaneous now as opposed to requiring thought.

Point being that you can do just fine for a long time without instinctively knowing left from right. You can hide these things well.

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I actually had this with the doppler shift blue/red coming/going and attributed it to the binary ness of it I could never just remember it.

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I have something somewhat similar with directions. When I give directions or say which corner something is on I visualize it on the city map of Austin, then I zoom out and look for California or the East Coast to determine which direction it is. It's an almost instant process, but unless I've seen a street sign that says East Highway whatever, or have traveled on it myself while considering the direction I need to see the map of the US in my mind before I can state which direction it is.

For whatever reason I don't have to do this with North/South I either don't think about it, or simply visualizing Austin is enough. Same thing applied when I lived in Madison, WI. OK, so I'm starting to think this is quite different than your situation or OP, but whatever, I've typed it already.