We Are All Born Right-Handed
Only the gifted overcome it.
I borrowed the title for this piece from a tee-shirt I purchased recently for my young niece, who is left-handed. It made me smile because I too am left-handed and have tried all my life with various levels of success to adjust to a right-hand-oriented world.
We lefties are sometimes proud of our handedness. Other times we can get a bit anxious and defensive. Inevitably there will be times when we feel awkward trying to cut a piece of paper with a right handed-scissor, or reaching out to turn a door handle that is not oriented towards our dominant hand.
As a leftie, there were times when I was young child that school held some stressful occasions for me. For example, all through the fifth grade my teacher tried to get me to write with my right hand.
All of my school papers that year were covered with barely legible, messy penmanship, much to my embarrassment. I loved to read and write stories, especially about horses, at that age. But when I tried to write anything, even about topics I liked, with my right hand, it was as if a flowing faucet of words and ideas dried up inside my head.
Fortunately this didn’t keep me from wanting to express myself through writing for very long. Once I had moved up to the sixth grade my new teacher could quickly see it was too late to change my handedness and did not try to make me write with my right hand.
So no permanent damage was done there. However, some lasting damage to my self confidence did happen when I was in the first grade. At age six, all us children were learning to use small, blunt edged scissors to make paper baskets, holiday decorations, and to cut out the letters of the alphabet from craft paper.
My alphabet letters, decorations, and little paper baskets always were lopsided and crooked, no matter how hard I tried. I felt humiliated, and I remember believing I must be a very clumsy person and always would be, because the things I tried to cut out with the school scissors never looked like the other children’s work.
It wasn’t until many years later that I learned how very difficult it is for a leftie to try to cut anything with a right-handed scissor.
If you are right-handed, stop for a moment and try picking up and using a typical scissor with your left-hand.
It will probably feel awkward because most scissors are oriented to the right hand, not the left. How I wish I had known this when I was a child. How I wish some adult would have noticed my struggles and explained what was happening.
Because of my failure when using right-handed scissors, I internalized the belief that I would always be clumsy. I believed I would never be good at crafts or other tasks that required manual dexterity.
To this day, I cringe inwardly at the very thought of trying to learn to knit or crochet or make origami or any craft that requires dexterous hands. At only six years old, I labeled myself as clumsy with my hands. Deep inside I still believe it.
Yet, as I wrote earlier, we lefties also feel a certain pride in our unusual handedness. After all, only about ten percent of the world are left-handed. That’s quite a distinction. And worthy of a tee-shirt logo!
We need only to think about famous lefties in history, in all fields of endeavor — Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Charlie Chaplin, Marilyn Monroe, Lewis Carroll, Harpo Marx, Spike Lee, Jimmy Hendrix, Paul McCartney Ringo Starr,Albert Einstein, Julius Caesar, Helen Keller, Winston Churchill, Babe Ruth, Pele, Neil Armstrong, Barack Obama, and Prince William are/were all lefties, to name but a few. Some infamous people were lefties too, but we won’t get into that here!
That’s a pretty impressive group of people to identify with. I wonder if any of them were ever told to stop writing with their left hand and made to pick up a pencil (or a paint brush!)with their right hand? I certainly hope not!
And I also hope that no child today or in the future is ever made to feel awkward because a right-handed scissor just does not fit right in their left hand.
