How Gauche

I’m left-handed. The world was not built for me.

Ok, I know what you’re thinking: good grief, one of those poor, poor, pitiful woe-is-me pieces about how unfair the world is to left-handed people. And you would be wrong. The world might be, but that’s not what this is about.

As a lefty, I tend to notice things. Things that don’t occur to my right-handed counterparts. I suppose it started when, as a child, I started learning to dress myself. Buttons were on the wrong side – although girls clothes do tend to have a left-handed bias for things like zippers and buttons. Learning to tie shoes with a right-handed mother teaching me was a revelation.

We had a plastic bank that was shaped like a shoe at our house. It came complete with a shoelace. The deal was, every time you managed to tie the lace correctly, you received a nickel. Before you laugh, you could actually buy a regular-sized candy bar with a nickel in those days, and the going rate for our tooth fairy was a dime.

My second oldest brother quickly managed to run my mother out of nickels, and he was cut off because he learned to tie his laces so quickly. But when it came to me, my mother despaired of my ever learning.

To be fair, my mother started training us in shoelace tying at age five. As an adult, I learned it’s actually a seven-year-old skill, so I shouldn’t be blamed for being slow on the uptake.

The trouble was, I was being taught to tie right-handed, something I was unable to do. Of course, being wired differently, I think coping strategies came more naturally to me than alternative methods came to my mother. I eventually worked out mirroring what I was being taught, and was able to tie my shoelaces by the time I was five and a half. It just took me a little longer to collect any nickels in the shoe bank.

Scissors were another hurdle. Back when I was in school, there was no such thing as left-handed or ambidextrous scissors. They were right handed. In case you’re wondering, left-handed scissors are hinged in the opposite direction, so that the fingers control the blade closest to them. This is the same way right-handed scissors work for right-handed people. This lends a little more power to the down blade.

Also, “in the olden days,” scissors had handles meant to be held in the right hand, and were slanted that way. That meant that, if you were a lefty and you had to cut more than a straight line, the handles began cutting into your fingers. It didn’t take long for me to figure out that if I turned the scissors upside down, so my fingers were squished into the thumb hole and my thumb was able to slide around in the larger one, I could enjoy pain-free cutting.

When I learned to sew as a teen, I discovered I couldn’t turn sewing scissors upside down because the bottom of the scissors was flat and at an angle to the handles to allow it to ride along a surface while cutting. Turning them upside down actually made it harder to cut. Fortunately for me, left-handed scissors became accessible right about the time I was learning to make my own clothes. They were twice as expensive as the regular kind, but such is the price of being unique.

In my career as a pediatric occupational therapist in schools, teachers often ask me what they can do to help their students cut better. My first question is, are they left or right handed? Most teachers are puzzled by the question. Handedness matters. While right-handed students cut circles in a counterclockwise direction, lefties should cut them in a clockwise direction. The reason for this is, if you’re doing it the opposite way, your hand is in your way, so you can’t properly see the line you’re cutting unless you angle your body in an awkward way. Even when cutting a straight line, the line needs to be on the opposite side of the scissors from the hand.

I learned young to watch people in a mirror if I needed to learn something fine-motor that they were doing. When people are explaining things to me, I often close my eyes, not because I’m trying to shut them out, but because I’m reversing the image in my head to understand it from my perspective.

I play guitar. I can play both left and right handed guitars. As a young teen, I spent hours sitting on my bureau, guitar in hand, playing into the mirror. I was trying to mimic rock star moves. As a consequence, I know what the guitar chords look like from both directions. I have, on occasion, when playing with other guitarists without music in front of us, said, “Just watch what I’m doing and do the reverse.” Right-handed people can rarely do this, and think I’m strange for even suggesting such a thing. I guess they didn’t play rock-star-in-the-mirror as kids. I guess they didn’t have to.

I truly believe that being left-handed gives me an edge when it comes to problem-solving. I never thought I was particularly gifted in this area until a few teachers met some of my suggestions with, “I never would have thought of that!” or with gaping mouths as they looked at me as if I’d just landed on the planet.

Once, after such an experience, I told a teacher, “I tend to think a little outside the box.” Her reply was, “A little?” When I came home and told Blue Scream of Jeff, he said, “You knew there was a box?”

I guess that means lefties are really a little more environmentally friendly. After all, we arrive without the packaging.