Happy National Left Handers Day

Depending on where you get your statistic, somewhere between 10 and 20% of the population is left handed. I am in that percentage. Sometimes when I sign something in front of someone, they will comment "Oh, you are left handed. My (insert type of relative here) is left handed." I say "Oh, that's good." Then I add (mostly to irritate them) "My husband is left handed too." Then they say, "Are your kids left handed?" At this point in the conversation I bore them with a few facts on the tendency to be left handed. Included in this little rant of mine is the fact that being left handed is only partly hereditary, partly due to environment, and partly due to unknown factors. Randomly, there is a one in ten chance that any human being will be left handed. If both parents are left handed, the chance increases to somewhere around one in four. I have three children, all from the same two left handed parents and all my children are right handed. Maybe if I had one more child, he or she would be left handed, but I don't want to know that badly!

There are more factors that play into this left handed equation like the age of the mother at the birth of the child (older mothers are more likely to have left handed children.) Infants who undergo a stressful birth or extremely low birth weight infants are more likely to be left handed. Babies who have been sonogrammed more times before birth  are more likely to be left handed. The way the world is mostly designed for right-handed people and the concessions left handed people make to operate in the world may be contributing factors as well. For example, how often do you see a left handed person operating a computer mouse with their dominant hand? My guess is not very often. We learn to use the mouse with our right hand out of necessity and practicality. There are left handed scissors, left handed golf clubs, left handed guitars, and many other left handed objects, but many times lefties just accommodate the righties possibly out of necessity or possibly due to our incredibly accommodating personalities and our higher than average IQ's. Just kidding!

Personally I use my right hand to do a lot of things. I cut right handed. I throw equally as bad using either my right or left hand.

For me, the biggest challenges with being left handed have to do with writing. People assume because I am left handed, my handwriting is bad. I'm not very fast with writing but I've worked very hard to make it legible and I actually have been told my handwriting is beautiful. Another challenge is because I turn my hand when I write, the back of my hand goes back over what I have written causing ink marks on the back of my hand that people often confuse for bruises. 

Besides the fact that most of us hate spiral notebooks, here are some other interesting facts about left-handers.

• Left-handed people are more likely to be schizophrenic, alcoholic, delinguent, dyslexic, and stutterers.
• People with neurological disorders such as Down's syndrome or autism tend to be left handed. 
• Left handed people are more likely to have Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis than right handed people. 
• Males are twice as likely as females to be left handed. 
• Left handed male college graduates on average earn 26% more money than right handed male college graduates. 
• The right hand is mentioned 100 times in the Bible, all in positive reference. The left is mentioned only 25, all negative. 
• Lefties live on average 9 years less than righties. 
• Lefties reach puberty 4 to 5 months later than righties on average. 
• Southpaws are more likely to have asthma, allergies, and migraines. 
• Left handers are 39% more likely to be homosexual. 
• Recovery from strokes tends to be faster for left handed people. 
• Lefties adjust to seeing underwater quicker. 
• We are more likely to be at extreme poles on the intelligence scale.

August 13 is "National Left Handers Day." So friends, if you are lucky enough to be a lefty, celebrate yourself today, or not, but do remember statistically you will have on average 3,287.25 fewer days to celebrate than your right handed buddies so you might as well make the days you have great ones.


Thanks for reading.