Right-handers don’t know how easy they’ve got it

To live with left-handedness is an obstacle to continually surmount. Power tools, musical instruments, kitchen implements, ink pens, golf clubs: all are layered with an extra degree of difficulty.

To live with left-handedness is to live in difference, otherness. Picture: istock

Growing up, it was a shop like no other. I used to take trips into Sydney’s Rocks area just to gaze into its windows. I sought comfort from knowing such a place existed. It was the Left Handed Shop, a treasure trove of wonder – complete with a bizarre left-handed clock. A world for weird us! It felt utterly magical to me, a left-handed child of right handers existing smoothly in their straightforward, unthinking, right-way existence. Because in the real world it felt easy, too easy to be left behind, unnoticed.

On the southpaw team: Barack Obama ...

... and Paul McCartney. Picture: Getty

I’m an island, an oddity, in a sea of right handers. No parent, grandparent or sibling is cacky-handed, and none of my own children are either, but that didn’t stop me placing crayons, hopefully, in tiny toddler southpaws in the desire it would somehow catch on. My daughter is left-footed on the footy pitch but can play as strongly with her right, a great advantage, but that’s it for the reluctant mollydooker strain being passed down.

To live with left-handedness is to live in difference, otherness. It’s the obstacle to continually surmount. Power tools, musical instruments, kitchen implements, ink pens, golf clubs, weapons: all are layered with an extra degree of difficulty for us. I never learnt a musical instrument as a child. Clarinet, guitar, violin were all so much harder for the lefty with the right-handed teacher. The one instrument I could have learnt comfortably on, the piano, was deemed far too expensive, cumbersome and posh; there’d be none of that malarkey in this household.

Leftie Rod Laver effortlessly strokes a backhand at Wimbledon in 1969.

Never mastered knitting, nor crochet. My brain would hurt with the strain of trying to do everything according to instructions when instinctively I wanted to flip everything around. No one seemed to consider the sheer mental energy expended trying to exist in a world not made for you. Years later I read that left-handed knitters were sometimes forced to study themselves in mirrors in order to master more complicated stitches; the manoeuvres given in instruction manuals were for right handers. Oh, the relief! So I wasn’t just dumb for not being able to master knitting as effortlessly as all those girls around me? Yet I’d been made to feel it.

My two best friends in primary were both left-handed. Coincidence, or was there something in our brains that drew us to each other besides difference and clumsiness? Over the years I’ve become used to zipper flaps, vegetable peelers and tape measures, but the bane of my existence is handwriting, still, as I curl the left hand like a protective claw around words that infuriatingly smudge across the page. Little clouds, blurs and dots of ink smear my letters; ink pen trauma is real.

But the world that continually thwarted us is shifting away from manual dexterity. Back in the day we craved many gadgets – special can openers, upside-down scissors – to help. Not as much now, though, because people don’t do so much manually; cans open with a tab and knitting’s not as ubiquitous.

Novelist Maggie O'Farrell. Picture: Kate Peters

The word “left” derives from the Anglo-Saxon lyft, meaning “weak”. The Latin word is sinistral, which shares a cosy root with “sinister”. It’s the dishonoured hand, the dirty hand. We die on average five years earlier. Why? Existing in a world not made for us perhaps. As novelist Maggie O’Farrell pointed out, “Two and a half thousand left-handed people are killed every year using things made for right-handed people.” JW Conway’s 1935 On Curing the Disability and Disease of Left-Handedness declared that being a lefty was a handicap in a world hellbent on industrialising and standardising. Yet they haven’t done too badly. On the southpaw team: Barack Obama, Germaine Greer, Rod Laver, Leonardo da Vinci, Paul McCartney, Allan Border, Mozart, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, to name a few.