A topic came up in my mind during the last months and during the last days I found that I have to delve deeper into it – I´m a left-hander being trained from youth on to use make the right hand the dominating one. And I found that this may explain some of my characteristics, some good ones and some bad ones and what I want to do now is to reverse this process, meaning training my left hand to complete task which I would normally do with my right hand.
My motivation is to test what effect this will have on me, I´ll basically do this for the experience and because I think it will have a positive effect, not in the sense that I´ll become a better person but that I can be in better accordance with my own, to better understand myself.
I´ve know that I´m a left-hander since my childhood, it´s something which has been clear to me my whole life but so far I didn´t pay much attention to it. I write with my right hand (and have a terrible handwriting), I clean dishes with my right, use cutlery like a right-hander, use the mouse on the right side, I use right-hander stuff, it´s normal for me to use my right hands for almost all tasks. But I play table-tennis or badminton with my left and I´m left-footed and this shows that originally my left side is my dominant one, the stuff I do with my right was trained (or I would even say ‘forced’, but this is too harsh since it was not done on purpose as I´ll explain in a second.) on me as a child. But before you think this goes in the wrong direction I want to make a statement here:
Point 1: I don´t blame anybody, not my parents, not the society, not my teachers, nobody. Things were as they were and are now as they are, there´s no point in looking back and feel grief or hate.
Life consists of events which are influenced by fate and one´s decisions. And what I´ve learned this year is that fate can be provoked by doing lots of stuff, take a risk once in a while, to make events happen. Sure, I´ll fall sometimes, make mistakes and feel bad about things once in while, but this is better than doing nothing, taking the easy road and just letting time pass. You only life once, there is no such thing as a second chance. Enough kitchen philosophy for now, back to the task.
So what I´ll do the next days and weeks is using my left hand for mundane tasks, practice writing with my left but also read deeper into the topic and let you know about the results.
If you are interested into the topic rummage in the net for “forced dextrality” “forced right-handedness” or similar and let me know, I´m interested in knowing more.
If you find yourself in the same situation and want to try this too I have a word of advice though: Having read a bit into the topic, trying to switch back to the left hand may not be without risk and there are warning signs from psychologists that this should not be done without professional aid since it is an intrusion into the brain structure and can have severe consequences.
Now I´m not afraid of messing with my brain – I have done this my whole life – and am doing this without any help, because I know myself best and can evaluate things on my own. But maybe you shouldn´t do this on your own – just saying.