Left-Handed Tools In a Right-Handed World
International Left-Handers Day is celebrated every August 13th, not that every left-handed person knows about our special day. We left-handers make up only 10-12% of the world’s population, so I’ve gotten used to living in a world made for right-handers.
I’m a lefty when it comes to writing, using the chopsticks, and eating with a spoon and fork set (spoon on the left, fork right). Lefties also wear their watch on the right hand, as I do. For everything else, I’ve begrudgingly adjusted to the right-handed ways.
It was in grade school when I noticed that something felt “off” in the world. As a kaliwete (the Filipino term for left-handed), my left hand had a perennial smudge, thanks to writing from left to right with a pencil on a notebook, chalk on a blackboard, and marker on a white board. In the classroom, I hated twisting my body to write on a right hander’s desk. They always ran out of left-handed desks! Tools hardly felt ergonomic for me. I chalked it up to just being clumsy.
When I played casual baseball (no gloves) with my cousins in San Francisco. I did it the left-handed way—throwing the ball with my left hand and batting on the left side of the home plate. My budding passion for baseball was put to an end when my grade school PE teacher in the Philippines told me I was doing it wrong. I was forced to throw with my right hand and wear a glove on my left, causing me to perform poorly in PE.
When learning to play the guitar in high school, I was told yet again that I was doing it wrong, so I had to adjust to how my right-handed tutor-friends played.
As for the basic handshake, I still get slightly disoriented whenever someone’s right hand tries to meet mine. I simply twist my left arm and force my left hand to shake with the right-handed greeter. It looks awkward, but this is my little leftist rebellion against the norm!
In 2024 I visited Lefty’s, The Left Hand Store in San Francisco, for the first time. Seeing and trying out the left-handed version of everyday household items—such as lefty scissors, lefty can opener, and a crooked left-hander’s pen—gave me an existential crisis.
Lefty’s, The Left Hand Store, Is Giving Me An Existential Crisis
As the Lefty’s staff handed me left-handed tools to tinker with, I felt both confused and validated. Using left-handed tools felt like I was returning to my home planet after acclimating to an alien planet most of my life. How strange to reboot to the natural ways.
Meeting my people in Lefty’s also made me realize that this offset feeling I’ve had for decades is valid. I was simply operating against what is natural and ergonomic—my left-handedness. Imagine if lefties like myself grew up with the “right” left-handed tools. We would’ve struggled less in the arts, sports, and daily mundane tasks.
As much as I wanted to buy everything from the Lefty’s store, I settled for the basics first.
1. Left-handed scissors have the left blade on top, reversed from right-handed scissors. This allows lefties to see what they’re cutting, working with the natural action of the left hand. My whole life I thought I was just a clumsy girl who wasn’t good with scissors. Heck, just two years ago I had a scissor accident that landed me in the ER for stitches. You mean to tell me I had just been using the wrong scissors my whole life? It took me a while to adjust to left-handed scissors, but now I refuse to use anything else.
2. A left-handed mug may seem like a joke because a mug is a mug is a mug, right? But if you look closely, a left-handed mug, when held with your left hand, has the main print facing the left-handed user. The same goes with a left-handed measuring cup, where the measurements are printed on the face towards the left-handed user. Compare that with the dominant right-handed mugs. Now I’m more conscious of left-handed mugs.
3. Left-handed notebooks are like Japanese books that are read back to front. It opens from the back page to front page, with the spiral wire on the right side, so lefties can write without pressing their wrists onto the wire. The “normal” spiral notebook was so uncomfortable for me in school. Another rumination: Would I have been more comfortable in countries like Japan where they traditionally write from right to left? No more smudges! But of course, I know people will debate about writing on the back page of the lefty spiral notebook, which just brings back the same issue.
4. A left-handed ruler reads from right to left, which is more ergonomic for me. I always felt “off” with normal rulers that measure from left to right. Can you imagine gifting this to a left-handed carpenter, engineer, or designer who has been conditioned to live in a right-hander’s world, not knowing there’s a more comfortable lefty version?
5. A left-handed pen has a crooked neck and off-center tip, allowing left-handers to see what they are writing. The fingers are farther away from the tip, so they don’t hide or smudge the writing. This makes so much sense as I’ve grown accustomed to not seeing the entire phrase or sentence I’ve written until I’ve lifted the pen away from the paper.
6. A left-handed pencil looks just like a regular pencil except that the printed text or design is made to be read left to right while the lefty is holding it with the left hand. It’s just like the left-handed mug! I was confused in the beginning, but when I compared it with regular pencils, it was a eureka moment. What a small but considerate change for the lefty! It made me look at all the other pens and pencils I’ve acquired and realized that most are right-winged. This one from Lefty’s comes with a left-handed pencil grip.
7. A left-handed sharpener is made to be held on the right hand, while you sharpen/rotate the pencil with your left hand counter-clockwise, which is much more natural for lefties.
You’ll find a number of left-handed specialty shops when traveling, like Lefty’s in the US, Anything Left-Handed in the UK, and Hidari in Japan. In the Philippines, bookstores like Office Warehouse, Stationery Central PH, National Bookstore carry the brand Maped, which supplies left-handed scissors and left-handed cutters.
After all these decades, I’m finally using the correct tools that match my lefty nature. Fellow lefties, do you use left-handed tools?
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