It's a lonely life being left-handed.
As a child, you couldn't find left-handed scissors or baseball mitts. When your mother tried to teach you to knit or crochet, it was difficult for her to figure out how to turn the instructions around.
As a teenager, you were forced to use right-handed desks and have your arm hang off the side.
By the time you reach adulthood, left-handers (I can't call us "lefties," after all!) have had to learn to adapt to the right-handed world. For me, this included using right-handed scissors, playing sports right-handed, still sitting in right-handed desks (called "cubicles"), and doing 10-key functions with my right hand. I figured out either how to turn things around so I could do it left-handed, or resigned myself to being slower or weaker and using my right hand. And this doesn't even include the things I really can't do because they are designed for right-handed folk.
I'm not as left-handed as my brother, who really can't do anything right-handed. I learned early to turn things around so that if I couldn't reach something one way, I'd switch paws and use the other. And there are a few amusing things I learned to do, like shooting pool with both hands so that if I couldn't make a shot with one had, I'd just turn it around and use my other hand (I've been accused of cheating because I could do that).
But worst of all is the amazing uncouth of right-handed people to left-handers. I've been stared at as though I were a zoo exhibit because I'm left-handed. I've been told to "just adjust" at work when I was stuck at a right-handed desk (OSHA has changed that). And I've been truly disturbed at the parents who seemed to be ashamed that one or more of their children were left-handed.
Well, those parents better get used to us. According to this article, the number of left-handers in the world is rising.
The number of left-handed people has risen dramatically over the past century, a professor has said.
The proportion of left-handers is now 11 per cent, compared to the three per cent it was among people born more than 100 years ago.
Chris McManus, the author of the award-winning book Right Hand, Left Hand, said the rise in the number of left-handed people may be because fewer left-handed youngsters were being forced to use their right hand.
My parents tried to make my brother right-handed, but he was so confused by it that, by the time I came along, they left me along. I still occasionally run across people trying to make their left-handed children right-handed. I don't understand it, since there are plenty of left-handed things these days, and many other things (like those children's scissors!) are now usable by either hand.
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