South Paw

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/health/views/08klass.html?ref=health

I was intrigued by the article referenced above because it’s about being left-handed. Of course you can’t tell this by my blog, but I am a proud southpaw. I am happy to be in the mix of many greats (I won’t list them all because it could take a while).

The article amazed me in a couple of respects. One of which was the statistics of how many left handed people there are. It’s only about 10% of the total population. I could have sworn it was more. I feel like I meet more and more every day that we were getting to about 20%. I guess not. Another interesting tidbit is that I was not the only one who was convinced to stop being left handed growing up. I thought it was just my nutty family. But nope, apparently many stigmas were attached to being left handed that many parents tried to change their kid’s preference to the right hand.

I remember my mom telling me that being left handed was bad. She tried over and over to get me to use my right hand. And I was ambidextrous for a while. But then one of my teachers (God bless her!) told my mom to stop doing that because it would only confuse me. Not sure if that happened but still I’m happy she said something! For a while I was able to do most things equally with both hands but now I’m clearly more comfortable writing with my left. I do throw a ball, use scissors and play most sports right handed though…and let’s not forget guitar playing. I wish I could write better with my right hand. It would have come in handy two years ago when I broke my left elbow and writing made me want to cry! But oh well.

The article also talks about how they still don’t know what makes the human brain choose one hand over the other. Maybe I just wanted to be in the minority and it’s as simple as that.