When I was in grad school I was studying motor learning, which addresses issues like “ambidexterity”. That’s in quotes because it doesn’t mean what most people think it means. I’d have to do some reading to update myself on this, but here’s what I remember…
Everyone needs to have a dominant side. It’s probably an evolutionary imperative. Without one, quick movements that might save our lives would be delayed. Kids who don’t show a preferred dominant side by around age five or six are considered at risk for developmental issues. The technical term (at the time, maybe it’s changed) is “incomplete dominance”. The analogy I recall a teacher using to explain this is as follows:
*Three kids are at a bus stop on a snowy day. One kid is right handed, one is left handed and one is ambidextrous / incomplete dominant. Three other kids throw snowballs at them. The right handed kid raises his right and blocks the snowball. The left handed kid does the same with his left hand. The “ambidextrous” kid hesitates because he has no natural dominant side and gets hit in the face. *
However… It is possible to get good at using your non-dominant side. Naturally left handed people often do this because the world is set up for right handers and they’re kind of forced to. But that’s not the same as being “ambidextrous” as most people use the term.
My personal evidence on this comes from my once being a pro juggler. I worked with many other skillful jugglers and I can tell you they all had a dominant side. Being jugglers, they were very good with their other hand, but they were all strongly righty or lefty.
So my guess is the OP is likely left handed, but has made adaptations to a right-centric world.
I’m left hand dominant. In art school we did exercises in drawing class using your non-dominate hand. From the beginning of the term til the end some of us got pretty decent as drawing and lettering with it. I was impressed because I was left-sided to a fault. My whole large family of sibs are left or ambi.save one, the youngest. Both parents were lefties.
Op, you’ve probably taught yourself to use your non-dom hand for some actions. Call yourself ambidextrous. I do. We are a unique group of weirdos
True ambidextrous is very rare. President Garfield was one such. He could write with both hands simultaneously, one in Greek, one in Latin. :eek:
The term I’ve heard for what the OP describes is cross-dominance. I have it as well, and I agree with the comments that it’s not a survival value. I find I’m often wondering which hand to use for something. Not a problem for me, but when Thag the caveman has to grab a spear to fight off the saber-toothed tiger, pausing to wonder which hand to use is not a good thing.
It also manifests for me as a lack of identification with “handedness” descriptions. If I’m driving and you tell me to turn left, I have to stop and think " left, left, which is left again?" By which point I’ve driven past the intersection …
Used to drive Mrs Piper crazy until I explained it to her. She didn’t believe me at first, but started giving driving instructions to me: “Your side” or “My side” and discovered that worked just fine.
I don’t appear to be ambidextrous in most ways – I’m pretty profoundly right-handed for things like writing, throwing a ball or Frisbee, doing personal hygiene things, etc. When I broke my right wrist, five years ago, and was in a cast for six weeks, doing things like using the toilet were incredibly awkward.
However…when I took an archery course in high school, at the beginning of the course, the instructor taught us how to determine which eye was our dominant eye, and it turns out my left eye is my dominant eye – the instructor said that it’s unusual, but not unheard of, for someone to have a dominant eye which differs from their dominant hand. I thus learned how to shoot a bow left-handed, and did the same, years later, when I learned how to shoot a shotgun.
As a kid and a teenager, I was terrible at hitting a baseball or softball. When I was in graduate school, I told my roommate (who had played baseball through high school) about the left-eye-dominance thing, and he said, “I bet you’d hit better lefty.” Sure enough, we went to a batting cage, and within 10 minutes, I was hitting the ball better left-handed than I ever had right-handed.
I think there’s a degree of ambidexterity in many of us. If you were to ask me, I’d say that I’m right-handed–that’s how I write, throw a ball, play golf, and fire a rifle, among other things.
But there are things I can only do left-handed. When I played road hockey when I was a kid, I always shot left; and I deal cards left-handed.
And then there are the things I can do either way. In baseball, I’m a switch-hitter, and I can shoot pool either way. There are a few other things, too. The point is, there are many of us who are not strictly right-handed or strictly left-handed.
I’m ambidextrous. Most skills i do better with whichever hand has practiced more. But I do have weak handed dominance. In general, I use my left hand for things that require fine motor coordination, but my right arm for things that require gross motor coordination. Still, I have a great deal of trouble distinguishing right from left, and that are absolutely times when I just fail at something because i don’t pick a side fast enough.
I was the kid who got in the face with a snowball because I couldn’t figure out which hand to put up. And you should see me on the tennis court trying to decide whether to hit a forehand or a backhand.* If there is a car behind me with its turn signal on, and I see it in the rearview mirror, I have no idea which way it’s going to actually turn, unless I take my hand off the wheel and point. Needless to say I have a horrible sense of direction. I don’t even think this is the only thing wrong with my brain.
However, after many years of writing with my right hand, my lefthanded writing is pretty bad, although sometimes I use it. Like, sometimes when I’m doing a crossword puzzle I will already have my coffee in my right hand and not want to switch. (Note: I can drink coffee equally well with either hand.)
Other weird things: Right hand, index finger is longer than ring finger. Left hand, ring finger is longer than index finger. Right foot, second toe is longer than big toe. Left foot, second toe is shorter than big toe. I mean, sheesh!
*Of course I mean when the ball is coming right at me and I have to move one direction or another. I know, I should have an ironclad rule about this.
Dominant right eye (according to my archery teacher), forced right-handed, dominant left foot. I can use simple tools with either hand, including scissors and monkey wrenches. The tennis teacher insisted that I had to play right-handed, to which I cried “but with the other hand I actually hit it!”. Dad verified that yes indeed, with the left hand I did hit the ball and put it where he indicated and took me off tennis. He also told the teacher about how he and his brothers would rip off people who were stupid enough to see them drink right-handed and assume they’d also play jai-alai that way (nope: one ambidextrous, two lefties, one righty). Called the teacher some things related to intelligence levels that I wasn’t allowed to say.
You’re left handed. If you weren’t, nearly all left-handed people would be ambidextrous because we all use our right hands for some tasks due to how products are designed. On the plus side, lefties fair better after a stroke than righties because we have practice using our right hands to a greater degree than righties use their left hands.
I tend to think I write and play sports right handed because that was the way I was taught as a kid and I did not have any issues with learning right handed.
My cross dominance really comes out when I’m cooking. I often find that the pot and spoon I’m stirring with are in the “wrong” hands so I have to shuffle things around. That happens all the time.
It also comes out when I’m peeling carrots and potatoes. I hold the vegetables in my right hand and the peeler in my left. I’ve tried the other way around and it just doesn’t work.
Then it’s time to slice the vege, and I hold the vege with my left hand and use the knife in my right hand. The other way around just doesn’t work.
Do you have any childhood memories of anyone trying to correct which hand you used to write with? Both of my parents were/are left-handed, and I am too. My mom had nuns who forced her to write with her right-hand by applying corporate punishment and tying her left hand behind her back when she didn’t. My dad’s grandmother tried to “teach” him to be right-handed when he was little, at least until he mother caught on and told her to knock it off. And even though I’m only 42 my first grade teacher tried to make me write right-handed too (“we write with our right!” she’d say…at least until my parents complained to the principal).
People used to think it was kinder to train you out of being left-handed so you could do things “normally” because they didn’t know that it caused other problems even when you successfully got a small child to stop using the correct hand. Clumsiness, poor penmanship etc. So, lots of people where “retrained” to be right-handed until not too terribly long ago.
I wonder if Rafa Nadal’s first teacher tried that. I noticed that he signs tennis balls after the match with his right hand. He signs the camera with his right hand. But he beats people with the racquet in his left hand.
Probably you should have transferred to his academy.
ETA: I tried it both ways. I could, and still can, do a very good lefty serve, but on the whole I think I play better righthanded. I did play lefthanded when I play with my sons when they were young. Not that great on either hand, frankly…but it’s fun.