An Experiment

Now I'm not sure how many people I've told, or how many people have picked up on this, but my left is stubbornly refusing to admit it is the off-hand. From experiences and slowly noticing the habits that I have across various activities, a story that my mom told me of my childhood makes more and more sense.

My mother tells me of a time where when I was young, before I could speak. I would grab everything with my left hand, and swing it around, only using my right hand to perhaps hold onto something that did not quite capture my attention or that I wanted to "put away for later." Now growing up in the stereotypical Chinese family, where chopsticks are ALWAYS held (not so strict anymore, I guess) with the right hand, as I grew older, my mom said that I would slowly be "corrected" to prefer my right hand to my left.

To this end, I believe that I was truly ambidextrous at some point of my life. At some point, my right hand most have felt just as natural as my born-instinct to use my left hand. I think the tipping point of no return was when I entered pre-school, where we started to learn how to write the ABCs. I think that day I felt pretty good with my right hand, and thus the teachers taught me to write right-handed, and that was that.

Now there are certain aspects or habits that all point to why I am not naturally-right handed. The biggest indicator, is that I am completely left-foot dominant in soccer, where it is pretty hard to switch dominant feet. My penmanship with my left hand, is that of perhaps a 3rd grader, someone who just never really learned cursive (which leads to many additional questions). Whenever I'm drinking any beverage, I always reach out for it with my left hand, unless it's more convenient to take it from someone with my right. Finally, I may dribble with my right hand, but I am a left-handed shooter. At any rate, now as a 21-year old, I decided it was going to be fun to experience what it was like when I was little: to be left-handed.

I went to work today, and basically did everything that would normally be done with my right, with my left. To my pleasant surprise, most tasks, such as pipetting, sorting tubes, writing on plates, were just as easy, if not easier with my left-hand.

Coming home, I suppose the only task that was significantly challenging was pretty obvious: eating dinner with chopsticks. After getting my left hand locked into the chopstick hold, I felt like I was following the 1-2-3 step directions of how to use chopsticks seen on disposable chopstick sleeves. "Now you can pick up anything!" If only it were that easy, then I would have been tearing it up with my lefty chopsticks.

I found that today was a very enlightening experience, that within my day at the lab running experiments, I was running my own, personal experiment. Perhaps one day I can return to being truly ambidextrous, but that may have to wait until much later in the future.