Artwork by Gio Cafaro

You need to cut a piece of paper in half, but you’re having a difficult time.

Why?

Because you’re a lefty living in a righty world.  Simple things that righties take for granted can often be challenging for a lefty.  Here are just a few:

Scissors

Scissors are the absolute worst when you’re a lefty. It’s awkward to cut with your wrist orientated in a way that takes away the force behind your hand. Flipping the scissors makes the blade slightly off kilter from where you need to cut.

I do understand that there are lefty scissors, but it’s frustrating that we have to go on a scavenger hunt to find a pair at school, or we have to just buy lefty-scissors ourselves. It’s not fair that righties don’t have to go through all this just to cut a piece of paper. It would be a lot easier if there were just lefty scissors available in all classrooms.

Writing

Another aggravating everyday occurrence for lefties is writing. When a lefty is writing, they play “Follow the Leader” with the pencil, whereas righties’ hands lead the way for their pencils and pens. They have a clean piece of paper on the other side of their writing hand, so they don’t constantly smear the graphite or ink. When you’re a lefty, the graphite and ink smudges all over your hand, wrist, long sleeves, and paper.

Sure, you can prevent this by hooking your wrist towards your forearms and writing like that, but that is extremely uncomfortable. You could also look online for quick drying ink pens, so you can write normally and not smudge your writing. But once again, lefties have to go out looking for supplies rather than just having them available whenever they’re needed.

Desks

When sitting in a desk, our arms don’t have a convenient armrest like righties do. Our arms are hanging off the desk limply making our whole body twist slightly to the left. It’s either that, or we have to hold our elbow up so that it’s perpendicular to our shoulders which is painful and gets tiring for our arms to have to be held up in such an awkward position. It would be easier to write if the school could provide enough lefty desks in the classrooms for all lefty students.

Sitting with other people

When we sit next to righties, our elbows bump into each other. We have to make a conscious choice of where we sit at a restaurant or a meeting, so we don’t play a game of elbow boxing the entire time. Yes, I do understand that it’s frustrating for righties to sit next to lefties too, but considering only 5-10% of the world population is composed of lefties, we have to deal with the elbow boxing match a lot more often than righties do.

Who are these famous lefties?

Hover over the numbers to reveal the names of these left-handed celebrities.

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Artwork by Gio Cafaro;  Image Map Programmed by Jake Barbieri