this post was submitted on 14 May 2026
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I remember my dad would tell me his teachers (mean ass nuns) would make him put his knuckles on the desk and smash that shit with a ruler until he stopped using his left hand
I remember my classmate telling me that they did the same to her in Louisiana public elementary school in the late '90s. The teacher even told her that it was because she was using "the devil's hand."
80s I was told I was holding it wrong. Don't known if I would have been left handed as penmanship from both hands sucks.
Can confirm. My kindergarted teacher in the early ‘90s slapped my hand with a ruler. Not sure if it was for religious reasons (there was no indication) or she just thought it was wrong. I write with my right hand now and my penmanship is shit.
Holy shit, I’m so sorry your dad went through that. Like how is smashing a child’s hand less of a problem than that child using their ‘other’ hand to write?
Honestly, I’d really like to know what people were so concerned with. All I ever heard was ‘it’s not the correct way’, and the only evidence my mind can stretch to support this is based on the fact that sure, it’s a right handed world and certain things are more efficiently and even safely used with a right hand. I’ve also heard a few cultural reasons regarding cleanliness but these are from cultures far removed from mine and obv never given as an actual reason (to me directly) why using one’s right hand over their left is preferred.
Idk shit like this and many other examples just remind me of how quickly others turn to control and rigidity when faced with something they don’t understand/doesn’t ‘fit’ into their mental presets. This post officially has me in my feelings this morning.
I mean it was jersey in the 70s, he's never been too broken up about it
Yep my mother and grandfather both went through that shit. It made my grandfather very ambidextrous.
i had one like these at school too. i often think about whether i should visit her again ... just as an "update" sort of years later ... due to her age, she's probably dead by now
Ah since some of us are sharing our childhood experiences with being left handed:
I am ambidextrous, like many lefties. While learning to write my letters in Kindergarten (age 5 for non-US peeps), my teacher noticed that I’d switch hands when the one writing got tired. She didn’t like this at all and kept telling me that I needed to choose one. She actually made quite a stink about it so I chose my left, idk why the left specifically.
I still write with my left, despite trying to retrain back to writing with both at different times in my life. I feel like a mini superpower was taken from me.
Interestingly enough, I’ve noticed that my large motor skills are best used with my right side (arm, leg, hand), and my small motor skills with the left. I think it’s a leftover from being truly ambidextrous, or it may be common amongst left handed people. Idk…the very few others I’ve asked seem to be left handed/sided exclusively.
She didn’t like this at all and kept telling me that I needed to choose one.
i hate it when someone sees something cool and unusual and immediately feels the need to correct it... as if it were a negative thing.
oh - a kindergartner is so good at writing that they can write with either hand, and you see a problem in that?? it's such a sad way to think! it's counterproductive pedantry
I think if I had to choose a hand I would choose the right, just because we write left to right and I wouldn’t want to track my hand through fresh pencil and pen marks.
My friend in highschool was left handed and his left hand was always completely covered in graphite.
Yeah I definitely didn’t think it through, because too small lol.
I too suffered the graphite mark and even had it transfer to my face via scratching an itch. Very embarrassing as a kid!
I also had a tough time with spiral notebooks, markers, and craft scissors.
nobody is really wired to me one hand or the other, we can all learn to be ambidextrous. your are that way because you just feel more comfortable/experienced doing certain things with one hand than the other, it's a formation of neuromuscular habit.
it's just a matter of practice, but yes, as children the adults around us often DEMAND we be one or the other. just like they demand gendered behaviors, etc. And children conform because adults like conformity.
it's interesting as an adult, like getting coaching and having to re-learn basic bio mechanics you 'assume' are some sort of default, because well, nobody ever told/taught you you could/should be doing things differently. like there are different way to hold pens for different styles of writing...
not any different really when say, comes to language use and accents. you have a 'native' one you got from your upbringing, but you can unlearn it and a lot of people do because they won't gain social acceptance if they retain it. when I code switch to my 'native' speech... people freak out because it offends them because I'm supposed to sound smart and 'educated' , not like a stupid working-class hick. and of course, the first year i came back from college all my family/friends basically asked me why i was such a douchebag and talked so pretentiously...
I don't believe that's true - handedness is a real thing. You might be able to learn to perform well enough with the other at something with practice, but that doesn't mean there isn't a naturally dominant hand for most people.
I was talking to a friend recently. I was telling them that I felt like maybe I was hallucinating my diagnosis because so many people around me also had been diagnosed.
She pointed out that we both like to be around people that understand. They don’t get mad when we interrupt each other because they are struggling with the same thing.
She was so right.
You could also both be hallucinating.
Collective delusion/hallucination is a real thing. Often reinforced when like minded individuals form a tight social group that serves to isolate them from anyone who might challenged the hallucination, and who seek to reinforce it in each other.
Human beings are prone to mass hysteria because we are social animals, and our 'truth' about the world is largely a construct of our agreement with our peers. Psychological illness and behaviors, like anorexia, paranoia, etc. are transmissible psychological conditions. They are ideas in your head that eventually become the truth of your reality as they are reinforced by the ideas and realities of the people around you, and part of the drive to do that is for people to have their ideals/realities validated by others.
Women who were interested in STEM were also called witches back then too.
Yes. Just read the story of Job to see how big of a bastard God is in The Bible
Also the definition was formalized. Grouping certain human traits and calling it by a common name wasn't a thing before.
The food supply is radically different to 50 years ago, let alone 100, 1000 and 10000 years ago. There is reason to believe brain structures are changed by diet.
I'm sure there were undiagnosed autistic people throughout history, but I reckon the glut of diagnoses now is due to food
Ed. Right. So the highly processed food and ubiquitous sugar couldn't possibly have anything to do with it. I'm so glad that Lemmy people know so much that they can exclude this hypothesis so easily and without even commenting
Yeah the literature coming out on the metabolic brain connection, and improving metabolism resolving psychiatric disorders can't be ignored.
Given we are in a metabolic health crisis that is only trending up, it'd reasonable to speculate it has had a impact on larger mental health trends since the metabolic health collapse started.
I.e. 96% of western adults have impaired metabolic health.
There were always undiagnosed autistic people throughout history. The world and the sciences we live with were discovered by high functioning people with neurological differences.
Science, religion, math, everything.
Also the un-taboofication of it... see, the "left-handed epidemic"
The people who say that can't read graphs.
Does this graph account for the huge lack of available diagnosis?
We've been on waiting lists for YEARS that only grow and grow to get a 2 hour appointment with someone who can diagnose us with ADHD.
It'll never happen, I'm sure. The government would rather not put resources into diagnosis, so they can claim almost nobody has ADHD, and not provide any support or recognition for it.
Two psychiatrists have told me that I almost certainly have ADHD but "we don't prescribe controlled substances" so they weren't going to formally diagnose me. It seems the only place I can get a diagnosis as an adult is private specialty clinics. I'm poor and the two clinics in my area aren't sliding scale (which I can't afford for most clinics anyway) so I just get to sit here with a confirmation of what I've known for years and no way to get it treated, or at the very least, put down on paper
Good lord what country do you live in?
I’m sure we can guess
The United Dumpsterfires Of America?
I am fairly confident I will lose access to my ADHD medication under RFK and I am completely unconfident centrist corporate Democrats like Gavin Newsom will give a shit about actually addressing fixing it if one of them wins power after Trump. They will completely accept the narrative we are "overdiagnosing" ADHD put out by Republicans and keep helping Republicans move the goalposts until I am dead.
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