I have never considered myself ambidextrous. I’ve learned some skills requiring ambidexterity (violin, piano, typing, using my phone, and my work), but my left hand has always felt stupider than my right. A month ago, left handedness was forced upon me when I got a cat bite on my right forearm. Being a body and movement nerd, I became my own experiment.
The first week was a mess. I was extremely grateful for mouthwash, since my mouth never quite felt clean after brushing my teeth with the wrong hand. I managed to not spill much food on myself, but I did have to eat extremely slowly and deliberately. I ate a lot of a take-out and stayed far away from trying to cook anything more challenging than frozen tortellini. I fumbled my way through washing, bandaging, and icing my right arm. Luckily, this all happened just a couple of days before Christmas when I was already not going to see any clients for a week and a half.
Have you ever tried using a spoon with your non-dominant hand? It’s absurdly hard, especially once you get to the bottom of the bowl. Think about it. Not only do you have to turn your hand in a direction non-dominant hands rarely turn, you also have to coordinate very specific amounts of pressure in even more specific directions from different fingers all at once. The same goes for scooping up the last bits of salad with a fork. I haven’t tried using chopsticks. That would surely result with food all over myself and none in my mouth.
My arm healed well, but very slowly. Because of the location of the bite, any use of my right hand moved the tissue where the deepest of the four punctures was, so I relied almost entirely on my left hand for two weeks. My left hand got smarter quickly with all that use, but it also got fatigued easily from not being as strong as my right hand and wrist.
Around the three week mark, I lay down on the floor to do an Awareness Through Movement® lesson. At the beginning of nearly any ATM, you’re asked to lie down and notice how you are on the floor, where there’s contact, where there’s space, and what patterns you still carry lying down. Generally speaking, they change gradually. Over the course of three weeks, mine changed dramatically: my left arm and hand were resting entirely differently by my side and feeling very awake; most of the weight in my pelvis was to the left, not the right like usual; my head was at a different angle and turned a different direction.
I always knew that hand dominance affected movement, one of countless factors that do, but this was my first chance to really see that in myself. While the circumstances of my accidental experiment have been awful (I don’t recommend puncture wounds of any kind), it’s been an interesting learning experience. It’s been a month since the bite happened and I’m still using my left hand about 1/2-2/3 of the time. I plan to keep brushing my teeth with my left hand, because I think I actually brush better with it than when I’m on autopilot with my right hand.
Have you had an injury preventing you from using your dominant hand? Are you actually ambidextrous? What surprises have you found around handedness?
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