as small as a world and as large as alone

7:02pm June 29, 2014

amorpha-system:

youneedacat:

clatterbane:

nickcarragay:

isn’t it weird that we have one hand that knows how to do everything and then one hand that just sits there like “I don’t know how to hold a pencil”

Mixed dominance FTW. ;) I’m not as good at writing left handed, but that’s probably about as much from less practice. Better at doing different things with each hand, depending on which I started doing that thing with.

I was kind of surprised to find out that some people do run into significant problems doing a bunch of things if their dominant hand is in a cast or something. But, handedness is apparently another spectrum thing.

I’m apparently very strange because I’m strongly left-dominant — left-eyed, left-eared, left-handed, and can barely do anything with my right hand other than scissors.  Apparently most left-handed people are actually fairly ambidextrous compared to right-handed people, and strong left-handedness is extremely rare.  But somehow I’ve got it, don’t ask how.

I’m kind of a weird outlier in here.  But maybe not as weird as I think I am.

I always felt, when I was a kid (the last time I fronted much before 2012) kind of a “dysphoria” about our body’s right-handedness.  I know this is a dangerous thing to talk about in some places, to mention dysphoria in any context that isn’t about binary gender, because people act like it’s a ‘slippery slope’ (I think that’s the term for it anyway) and start saying things like “what next, what if someone identifies as a blender and says that’s their real body, if you don’t restrict dysphoria to gender only.”

I actually use my left foot for a lot of things.  To move stuff around and so on.  Sometimes I even use it when I have the choice to use my hands instead.  We write right-handed, but I sometimes wonder if even that is like an “artifact” of actually having terrible eye-hand coordination as kids and having to spend a huge amount of time painstakingly learning to write “properly,” effort that no one ever saw.  So teachers just saw us with a pencil in our right hand and started drilling us in handwriting from there.

But this is something I know is real because other people have noticed it: I often reach for and pick up stuff with my left hand more than other people in here do.  I recently started giving myself permission to use the stylus pen at convenience store debit card things with my left hand (but then I get mixed up if it asks me for a signature, because our ‘default front signature’ is right-handed) and press buttons with my left hand and stuff.  I don’t know why I felt like I had to give myself “permission.”  Maybe because every time I tried to write with my left hand, it was even worse than my usual handwriting, and people in our family made fun of me for it. (They made fun of a lot of things for petty reasons.  Don’t ask.) 

So I’m trying to get over my ‘hangups’ about doing things ambidextrously.  It feels like such a stupid thing to think I need “permission” for.  And yet, the feeling that I need to have it when I do things I decided were “forbidden” to me at one point… is very real.  Even if it’s just about giving myself “permission” to press buttons with my left hand.

-s2

Is it all of you that react this way with your left hand, or just some of you?  Because I’ve known other people in plural systems who had a handedness different from the rest of the system, and that seems to be a thing.  But you probably know that already?  Definitely you shouldn’t need permission to use whatever the hell hand you want to.

I’ve heard of parents who basically forced the issue, or who took kids who would’ve been ambidextrous and made them use their right hand because it was just easier, and things like that.  My parents were very aggressively against anyone ever forcing me to use any hand I didn’t want to use, and in fact when I started using my right hand for scissors they thought something had gone wrong at school and got really worried.  (Maybe something had gone wrong at school, I don’t know.  Because I started out using my left hand for scissors and then somehow ended up eventually using my right, and it’s the only thing I do with my right hand.)

866,672 notes