Talk To The Brain . Part 12
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
Continued from previous blog post
And then so when I would write using my left hand, a “wooden ruler” would hit my fingers, and of course I didn’t understand why I would get hit… “Use your right hand for writing!!!”… says the teacher…
… so I would switch over.
The problem was, when I used my right hand, I ended up writing backwards… like this …. “sdawkcab” ….
So I really felt weird and was treated as if I was this weird kid. I mean, I look normal, I just could not write using my right hand, I preferred using my left hand. And for the life of me, even as a kid, I didn’t understand why being a leftie was so bad.
Talk To The Brain
Until a teacher actually took time out to “indoctrinate me into talking to my brain”… and telling my brain what to do.
She made me hold two pencils, one on my left hand, and one on my right. Two separate sheets of paper.
She told me to tell my brain as I was writing my name on the sheet of paper on my left hand (which was “my normal”) to tell my right hand hand to follow EXACTLY what my left hand was doing.
That was how I learned how to write using my right hand, and at the same time stopping my right hand from writing backwards. 🙂
When this teacher taught me that technique, in my kid brain, I realized I was “different” and it was a good kind of different. I didn’t mind being weird.
Since it was then that I realized too that God created me differently. So, these days, people, and even school, labels kids, they say “special needs”… it’s like “special child”.. they call it these days different labels, ADD (attention deficit disorder) ADHD, autism, aspergers, etc….
Said who?
There are people with physical handicaps, there are those with mental handicaps. Behavioral handicaps.
But is it really a handicap? Could it be that we just need to KNOW who that person is, inside, the way God has created that person to be?
This writing “handicap” that my early school said I had, (because of the number of times my left hand got hit with that wooden ruler) was not, in my opinion a handicap.
In fact it was a “secret” asset that I had and also that I nurtured. When I started asking my classmates, and then also as I was growing up, I ask, “hey, can you write with BOTH your left hand and your right hand”, like seriously….
… I didn’t find that many people. 🙂
So in class, I would write with my right hand, and when my right hand is exhausted, I’d start writing with my left hand. Growing up, the system I was educated in, the teacher would write like a gazillion things on the blackboard with white chalk, or colored chalk, and the students would copy what was on the blackboard.
I ended up having this very nice and very legible penmanship. Because I literally wrote so much.
Continued on next blog post
Related Articles:
The Basics . Part 1
Final Answer . Part 2
Varsity . Part 3
Clique . Part 4
Perks . Part 5
Complex . Part 6
Quarter . Part 7
Graduation . Part 8
Tutor . Part 9
So What . Part 10
Ambidextrous . Part 11
Talk To The Brain . Part 12
Gifts . Part 13
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