How It Feels To Be Left-handed Me

I am left-handed, but I may be the only left-handed person in her twenties to wear my Claddagh on my left ring finger instead of my right without being engaged or married. But that’s another story.

I remember the first time my left-handedness was pointed out as something specific to me, something that made me. I was eight years old and consumed mainly in the world of horses. Horses everywhere. My little toys. Imaginary horses running beside me. Little horsy doodles in the margins of my science and math notebooks. I was more dreamy than perceptive, and in my world there was no real difference between me and the people I loved most in the world except maybe the fact that they were less horse-intuitive than me. But this one day my tactless dreamer self had done something to set off my older sister, and she took advantage of my pathetically gullible nature. She whispered, hissed the word “adopted” at me along with the rationale that I was the only one of five siblings who wasn’t born in October, who had brown hair and brown eyes, and who was left-handed. It made sense. In a family of seven (the others hadn’t been born yet), I was an anomaly. I wrote with my left hand. I had tried writing with my right like my brothers and sisters did, but it wasn’t the same. My ‘D’ didn't have the same loopy ease as it did with my left, and my right-handed horses looked like cows. I was too ashamed and confused to mention anything to my parents, and for about a week I lived in fear that my left-handed brown-eyed Aquarius self was in fact adopted.

I soon came to my senses. And I soon adopted my left hand as a favorite part of myself: the part that moved a pencil to translate the whimsical imaginings of my mind onto paper. The part that connected me to my godmother and later to a younger sister, whose birth in February and hair color also proved that I was not the only stranger among the siblings. The part of me that became part of me.

And I am not tragically left-handed. I do not cringe when people assume my handedness and reach out a right hand to shake mine upon greeting. The pinky side of my left hand is not blackened with charcoal or ink because I drag it in the wake of my writing. Au contraire - I write with a strangely hooked hand that somehow avoids that mark of doom. I don’t cry out the oppression of a left-handed person forced to use scissors built for right hands. I don’t feel triggered by the word ‘ambidextrous’ or the phrase “dancing with two left feet”. Instead I take pride in knowing the etymology of the former and the idiocy of the latter. I am not “sinister” as my man Cicero would say; I’m just me.

I do not always feel left-handed in a right-handed world. My difference seems to pose a special challenge or advantage in the world of sports, for example. When I make the basket from that sweet spot right behind the boards of the hoop or when the outfield shifts when I step to the plate, I feel a kind of power. Even if I don’t hit the ball that far. I’m only mildly ashamed to admit that when giving or receiving directions, I still have to make an ‘L’ with either hand to determine left from right. (I'm convinced that I missed a crucial stage in childhood development when I should have learned and solidified that skill of just knowing.) When Bruce comes onto the queue on my drive home from school, I don’t care which hand turns it up - I’m singing. And I don’t think my puppy knows the difference between the hands that scratch her neck beneath the collar when I return at the end of the day.

At certain times I have no hand orientation (I suppose that’s the term I’d use), I am me. I am the me who enjoys running for more than an hour at a time, even in the rain. I am the me who just wants to be with my people, even the ones who once convinced me I was adopted; and though I remain hopelessly gullible, I’ve learned to prey upon the gullibility of others. I do crosswords, read Tolkien, and breathe the ocean. I’m a sucker for those stupid little ad things that make you click on them to see things like the ten greatest film villains of all time. I spend valuable hours on research (Lord of the Rings or Star Wars memes - it’s research.). I bring my puppy to the field and watch her run every day. She just goes where the ball goes or where she wants to go. She has no concept of left or right.

Sometimes I feel my left hand take hold of me. On a nice June morning, I walk into the first day of summer class and I sit at a desk alongside my friend. He is right-handed. The desks are those small ones you see in colleges and grad classes, the hooks that flip around your right side and assume that’s the arm and hand you will be using as you take notes. The right side. I’m used to it. But then I see something different. Beautiful.

Across the room there is one desk whose tray is in opposition to the others. A left-handed desk. It is a unicorn in a sea of donkeys. As I process the reality of this desk, a crop-haired woman with purple everywhere it must be in the cells of her skin wades in and inhabits the object of my vision. As she lays out her bedazzled notebook, sticky pads (who uses sticky pads in grad school?) and pens, I hear her whiny drawl: “Oh, just my luck, it’s a lefty desk. Who even uses these? Ugh! Savages.” She gestures in a crippled sort of way how she might go about writing and grimaces with the feigned effort.

My left-handed self is not always offended, but when it is...my left hand rises from my side and walks on two fingers over to the offending woman and flips over her desk with a deft flick. Then my left hand holds a specific finger up to the woman that lets her know how we feel about her kind (the ignorant kind, not the right handed necessarily). My left hand continues to form the signs that tell her how it feels - ASL for “shut up”, “you’re incompetent” and “don’t want no scrubs”. My left hand holds a pair of right-handed scissors to her throat and forces her to admit that her right hand is uglier than mine. And my right is ugly. It holds the scar of where my left stabbed it - a Z. (I don’t think my left meant to do that to my right, but it did.)

My left does want to stab Purple Pants now, but we won’t. We’ll let her wallow in the desk we want but can’t have because of her. I come back to reality - ope, there goes gravity - and she’s still writing in that horrible handwriting with a yellow pen on her paper. Class hasn’t even started yet. I’m predispositioned to judge anyone who writes in yellow pen without due cause, so I justify hating her.

But in the main, I’m just on the left side of a pointillism painting. I have my own weight in color, shape, and size - it all depends on the weight of the brush tip at the time I press down upon the earth. I may be the liquid pearl in a woman’s ear or the vague sparkle on a water’s surface. Other brushes press down their colors along with mine. This woman may be a sparkle of sweat, and that man may be a splash of blood on the lawn (murder perhaps?). Anyway, we’re all something. I’m that one spot, but as you step back you can see my story as it fits along with others, the ones on the right and the left. We need each other; otherwise, we’re only a portion of a painting