by: Gowri Sunil

Local Editor

People assume the greatest fear of every kid is the dark or monsters, but in reality it’s something much more frightening – having to share a fun fact about themselves. From circle time in elementary school to the first day of freshman year, my mind would go completely blank when it was my turn to share. While some kids easily announced rare talents or niche interests, I shuffled through my go-to basic answers, which included my favorite color, the super interesting fact that I had a dog, and my love for swimming. Yet, what I never realized for the first fourteen years of my life was that my perfect fun fact had been right to the left of me all along, literally: my left hand. 

You always hear the pains of being short or the misery of applying to college, but no one ever talks about the struggles of being left-handed in a world designed for right-handed people. Though only 10% of the world is left-handed, it would be nice for the remaining 90% to consider the difficulties of learning the simplest hand maneuvers in reverse. So, as your left-handed El Gatan, I’m here to raise awareness to the daily torture and countless indignities that we face everyday.

One of the first challenges is convincing people I’m actually left-handed. With this news, most people either light up in amazement, demand proof, or worse, ignore in disbelief. The skepticism started early, in kindergarten, when my teacher assumed I was simply incompetent for not writing my name properly. Ironically, her default motto for penmanship, “right hand, right way to go,” made my circumstance a full-blown catastrophe.

Then, there’s writing. Whether it’s on a whiteboard or ink on paper, it’s essentially a crime scene in progress. While right hands effortlessly move across the page, my left hand drags through the wet ink as if it’s embarrassed by my own thoughts. By the time I finish a single sentence, I’m left with what some may charitably call abstract art.

Unfortunately, the struggles don’t end there; in fact, they’ve barely begun. Take spiral notebooks for example. They are more like medieval torture devices for us lefties, with coils nearly slicing into your wrists and forcing your body into awkward contortions. And then there are scissors, the main event in the Olympics of left-handed gymnastics. Designed exclusively for right hands, scissors turn every snip into an upside-down battle against gravity, making me feel like I’ve actually slipped into the Upside Down with Mike and Eleven, though instead of fighting demogorgons, I’m being defeated by office supplies.

Yes I have a dog, I like to swim, and I love the color blue, but none of these things have ever demanded real endurance. My true fun fact is that I’ve spent my whole life pushing through a world that favors the right hand, using only my left. So far, I’ve managed to come out mostly unscathed…for now.