Lefties live in a right-handed world. It’s not an injustice, it’s just a fact of nature. Only about 10% of people are left-handed. I grew up in a time when being a lefty wasn’t something teachers sought to correct, so my handedness was never castigated, but the struggle was real.

Some things I found incredibly difficult being a lefty as a child:

• writing: I remember watching a classmate effortlessly complete a yellow sheet of paper full of Palmer Method handwriting, and I threw my pencil down in disgust. Before me, the fruit of my concentrated labors, was a smudged sheet of my own with small eraser rips. I tried pencil grips to help affix my fingers to the barrel of the pencil or pens, and bore the telltale blue or graphite-colored side of my hand from dragging it across the paper over the expressed ink or pencil scribbles.
• cutting: scissors, unless they’re made for lefties, are made for right-handed people. Depending upon the accuracy of the task and the pressure required, using right-handed scissors doesn’t work well.

But then in grad school, I remember doing a short presentation on a topic of interest, and I settled on handedness. I found “The Left Handed Syndrome” by Stanley Coren and it revealed a number of ways the world is designed for right-handed people:

• doors have their knobs where your right hand can twist them;
• phone keypads on most office phones are to the right of the receiver;
• the controls on your printer are likely on the right side of the device;
• can openers are designed to be used primarily by the left hand;
• binders and notebooks, and even clipboards, favor right-handed writers;
• western writing requires us to move from left to right, requiring lefties to obscure what they have written as the move across the page.

I grew more observant about these orientations as I encountered them; where once I just shrugged it off as “the way things are,” I realized how little, in some cases, things could be adapted without harming the right-handed majority.

There are a few things I do right-handed, having adapted to the world around me:

• Golf: I can’t say I actually golf, but once when I was a kid, I was disappointed to learn that my grandfather had gotten me a golf lesson when I was up to visit (I didn’t care much for golf). The pro giving the lesson gave up after witnessing a few worm-burners and shanks and had me switch to hitting righty. That didn’t work at all and I blame by poor golf game on him. Not that I’m bitter.
• Play guitar: Guitars are generally designed for right-handers, although you can easily get a lefty model. Nevertheless, a hapless aspiring musician is likely to find a friend’s guitar and it will be a right-handed model; but the time he’s hooked, it’s too late to switch. I think this causes some issues for lefties, in that they fret notes on the neck with to much power, and lack the motor control necessary for optimal picking and strumming in their right hands.
• Mouse: I always appreciated that the Mac came with a single-button mouse; my hunch about this was that having one button was not only simpler, but didn’t require fiddling with mouse button settings to swap button functions on multi-button mice. Even the most modern Mac mice are easily adapted to left-hand use. I remember somewhere in the mid-2000s developing some RSI symptoms in my left forearm while playing a Lord of the Rings video game, and I decided to move my mouse over to the right of my keyboard while working to reduce the usage of my left hand. It worked nicely, and now I prefer mousing with my right hand (unless I’m gaming, which is never).
• Make Pour-Over Coffee: I don’t actually know how right-handed people make pour-over coffee, but I do know that I pour with my right hand, while my left hand does nothing. I don’t know why; there’s nothing about pouring hot water out of a gooseneck kettle, nor in the design of said kettle, that begs for right-handed usage.