Left is right!

A strange thing happened over on Google Plus the other day.

Actually, strange (in a good way) things happen there almost every day, so I guess I should say ‘stranger then usual’. 

I put out a call for people to shamelessly plug their blogs, as I do every now and then, because more blog followers=more bloggy goodness for everyone. At least, that’s how I look at it.

I linked my two blogs (yes, I have two…duh!) and one of my circlers, Ariella Brown, must have visited my writing blog (“Left and Write“…another shameless plug)  because they asked me an interesting question. It was something I, honestly, hadn’t thought about in probably twenty years.

“How has being left-handed shaped your life?”

Not an earth shattering question, no, but it did make me think. Mainly because I used to be pretty proud of being a lefty. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not ashamed of it by any means, it’s just that I don’t really even think about it much these days. Before the Internet came along, I used to buy books about “Famous Lefties” and such. These days, though, I can just Google it and get quicker results.

Family legend tells the tales of when I was but a wee lad and I’d pick something up with my left hand, my dad would take it out of my left and put it in my right. Why he did this, no one really knows. It wasn’t as if he had any religious convictions about it. My guess is that he probably thought being right-handed would make life easier, somehow.  I think this had the effect of sufficiently confusing my brain enough that I’m not a “true” lefty in that I throw and swing right-handed instead of left. I bowl and play tennis as well as ping-pong with my left hand, but shoot a basketball with my left or right hand.  See, I told you I was ‘cornfused’.

Anyway, some of the ‘childhood trauma’ I had to endure when I was younger, due to being left-handed:

• When I was in school, being left-handed meant always having to look for the ‘left handed’ desk which, sometimes, they didn’t have.
• Trying to write in a spiral notebook was a little uncomfortable.
• Writing in pencil meant a mess on the side of my hand.
• And forget about trying to use a pair of scissors

On the upside, though, being left-handed has made me a bit more adaptable than I probably would have been otherwise and I’ve since found that turning a pair of ‘regular’ scissors upside down works almost as well as a pair of ‘left handed’ scissors. I’ve also learned to use my right hand to cut things with ‘regular’ scissors.

A teacher friend of mine once told me that there were scholarships for lefties….something I never knew of until after I was out of college….of course.

I’ve seen instances where being left-handed was considered a ‘disability‘ as well as just plain evil.

Who knew?

All in all, though, I quite enjoy being left-handed and it’s probably shaped my life in more ways than I know. It’s like being in a secret society, or something, because I almost always notice if someone else is a lefty though, these days, that’s about the extent of my thinking about the subject.

Knowing that right-handed people are dominated by the left side of their brain and left-handed people by the right, I can always tell people that I’m in my ‘right’ mind…..

I know, I know….I’m not buying it either….