I’ve always enjoyed my extreme left handedness. Doing things with my left hand is effortless. It takes a lot of effort for me to learn to do something with my right hand on its own. Those things include: being able to use a hairbrush, a table knife, a crochet hook (I still control the tension & where the hook goes with my left hand though), a computer mouse (I use my left hand for track pads on laptops & am probably one of the few people who prefers the track pad to a physical mouse!), and scissors (but don’t ask me to cut a really straight line — I learned to use scissors with my right hand only because there were never left-handed scissors in school). That’s it. I’m grateful to my mother for standing up to family pressure when I started showing left handed dominance from the get-go as a baby.
Did you know:
- 10 US presidents including Bill Clinton & Barack Obama have been left handed?
- There is nearly an equal balance of left- & right-handed people among indigenous Americans? That’s because unlike Eurocentric cultures & their superstitious beliefs about left handedness being ‘evil’, indigenous Americans never cared which hand people use.
- Due to those Eurocentric superstitious beliefs which are still held today, some words with negative associations like ‘sinister’ come from the Latin root for ‘left’?
- Only ~10% of us lefties actually have mirrored motor control centers in the brain? That doesn’t mean you should make a left-handed child use their right hand (more), however!
If you’re right handed and working with a left-handed person, sit across from us to show us how to do something with our hands. That way, things will be oriented correctly for both of us. That’s what I do with the righties and it works really well!
Outside The Box 