With only 10 percent of the American population being left-handed, it's easy for people to forget about us. Being a left-handed person is not something that is new to the world, but it is still extremely hard for lefties to do things that right-handed people do EVERY. SINGLE. DAY without even thinking about it. From playing sports to writing, and even eating, being left-handed comes with a multitude of struggles:
1. Playing sports
When lefties are growing up, many of us choose to play sports. However, it is often more difficult to teach left-handed children how to play baseball, tennis, and really any sport with a ball, due to the fact that our dominant hand is not our right hand. Don't even get me started on how HARD it is to find left-handed gloves... sorry softball and baseball players!!
2. Kitchen utensils
In a perfect world, kitchen utensils would be universal and easy for anyone to use. Much to left-handed people's despair, almost every kitchen utensil was made for a right-handed person. Can openers, ice cream scoopers, and any other utensil with a handle or button is hard for lefties to use.
3. Scissors
Scissors deserve their own category. Any person who knows me, knows that I cannot cut straight to save my life. This is because scissors were
NOT made with lefties in mind! Not only is it difficult to hold a pair of scissors, cutting for too long hurts our hands, and we have an extremely hard time cutting in straight lines.
4. School
These wonderful desks that populate 95 percent of high schools and college classrooms everywhere are perfect for right-handed people. However, lefties cannot use these desks without bending over and looking like The Hunchback of Notre Dame. While most campuses now include a column of left-handed desks, these are often located on the far side of the classroom, so even if you are lucky enough to get one of these remarkable creations, you have no way of seeing the PowerPoint that your professor is lecturing from!
5. Writing
Every left-handed person knows the struggle of taking beautiful notes in class, only to have them smudged and ruined by our hand. In addition to ruining pages upon pages of notes, lefties cannot write in spiral notebooks, binders, or even white boards without having the rings imprinted into our hands, or even worse, erasing everything we wrote on the white board.
6. Eating
Eating with others is undoubtedly one of the hardest things to do as a left-handed person. Right-handed people are free to sit wherever they want at the dinner table, but as a leftie, you are often restricted to the far left side of the table. If you sit in-between people, you find yourself constantly bumping elbows with the person beside you.
Despite all of the struggles of being left-handed, I am proud to say that I am different, and I know that "leftie pride" is something that all left-handed people carry with them. Yes, we can't eat or use scissors like a "normal" person, but we do have plenty of stores that produce gadgets and tools JUST FOR US, which is beyond cool. There is also a holiday dedicated to all lefties, which just so happens to be August 13th. Happy (belated) International Left-Handers Day to 10 percent of America!!
