The Struggles of the Lefties – Xanthe Jones
Ask any leftie, “what’s the worst thing about being left-handed?”, and the answer will most likely be one of two things:
Smudges. There is nothing quite like finishing writing a piece of work, only to look back and find that not only have you coloured in the side of your hand as it ran across the page, but in doing so you have managed to render at least a third of the text illegible; not great for me when my handwriting already looks like most right-handed people’s leftie scrawl!
The question “are you left-handed?” every time you pick up a pen. No, of course I’m not left handed, I simply picked up my pen like this in order to seem cool and edgy. Righties, you’ve got to face it; if somebody starts writing with their left hand, chances are they’re left handed.
Personally, I do everything but write with my right hand. In terms of lefties, I’m a lucky one. Every leftie remembers the struggles of digging through heaps of scissors to find the one pair of left-handed scissors, and then they were probably blunt and/or broken. The confusing, and often painful life lesson of how to use righty scissors, rather clumsily, soon followed. Much like how your maths teacher will often remind you that you won’t always have a calculator with you, one day or another, every leftie will be up a stream without a paddle, or rather, in a geography class without left-handed scissors.
I obviously don’t know how being a leftie affects life after school – being but a naïve year 11 student – but in school it doesn’t have many upsides. Possibly the ability to convince the teacher to move you from your set seat next to somebody that you don’t get on especially well with by pulling the ‘but sir/miss, our elbows will clash’ (much like our personalities). However, this becomes a pain when you’re right on the right hand side, and just happen to be sitting with your friends- faced with the dilemma of speaking up and annoying the whole row by getting them to move down one, or keeping quiet and staying where you, probably ending up sitting next to somebody who started that lesson as your friend but will walk out 55 minutes later never wanting to see your face, or indeed your left elbow, ever again.
Although over 10% of the world is a leftie, this is a right-handed world, and we just live in it.
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