A Left-Handed Person in a Right-Handed World
It is estimated that around ten percent of people are left-handed. I am one of them. So are Bill Gates, Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey.
In the last few years I’ve begun to realise that being a southpaw is a blessing and a curse. Purely on a practical level, we do have to function in what is definitely a right-handed world.
At nursery school, a teacher showed me how to use safety scissors in my right hand, which felt alien to me, as I wanted to use my left. As I got older, tin openers were a challenge, and later I came to curse the cashpoints (ATMs) with the plastic guard on the left of the card slot - almost spraining my wrist to try to insert and remove my bank card.
We lefties learn and think differently too, apparently, with a higher chance of being dyslexic and/or having ADHD, as there does appear to be a link between neurodiversity and left-handedness.
It has been said that lefties are clumsy and accident-prone - but are we? Or are we simply struggling to function in certain situations? For example, items such as power tools will be manufactured for right-handed users. Understandable, as they comprise roughly ninety percent of people. This does present considerable problems for us however, as we may find such machinery to be unstable in our hands, with switches being harder to reach.
A study reported in the Daily Telegraph, according to everyday health.com showed that those whose left hands are dominant seem to be more effected by fear than right-handed folk. The study involved participants watching an eight-minute clip from the movie Silence of the Lambs. When asked to recall the events on screen, those who were left-handed showed more signs of post-traumatic stress disorder and were less able to give accurate information, making more mistakes than the right-handers in the process. It appears that the two sides of the brain have different roles in PTSD, but further studies would need to be undertaken to try to discover what is going on.
According to a study published in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, lefties are more prone to negative emotions and have a tougher time processing their feelings. Perhaps this may lead to bearing grudges. Confession time: I am a master at bearing grudges, so this rings true to me. To be fair, someone would have to do/say something pretty bad on more than one occasion, so I have, in the past, put up with a lot - but once you overstep the mark, you are off my Christmas card list.
Putting pen to paper means you run the risk of smudging, as your hand moving across the page from left to right can wipe out some of what you have just written. And sometimes your writing can slope to one side - which used to infuriate one of my teachers.
Some words and sayings can negatively depict left-handers; for example, the word ‘sinister’ comes from Latin, meaning ‘on the left side’. If a person is clumsy and/or terrible at dancing, they would often be described as having ‘two left feet’. Note that an invaluable assistant, who helps someone to carry out their work, could be praised by being referred to as their ‘right-hand man’ - not ‘left’.
Despite the pitfalls of being born left-handed, I don’t think I would change it. We southpaws have many good qualities and can often be imaginative, creative and intuitive. The world would be boring if we were all the same.