Writing left-handed again
I am left-handed.
I do everything, hold everything, touch everything, all starting with my left hand first.
Except for writing.
I used to write with my left hand, as naturally as breathing, as if it were a gift from God since the day I was born.
But, when I started going to school, when I began my education, I was forced to write with my right hand.
There were many reasons.
The person who taught me didn’t have the ability to teach me how to write if I used my left hand.
The teacher told me that none of my friends wrote with their left hand, so I shouldn’t be different, so I should be like them, so that I had to write with my right hand.
My family, who was there throughout my childhood, said the same thing, and made me conform to the rules that the people at school had imposed.
I wasn’t protected.
I was beaten, scolded, insulted, just because I wrote with my left hand.
That became a scar, a terrible memory, a fracture engraved deep in my mind from when I was just a child. It’s lasted all the way to now, something I wish I could forget, but simply can’t. It remains a ripple, a crack, a haunting shadow, all stemming from something so small and simple in childhood.
It sounds unbelievable, but I remember what I loved, what fascinated me, the things that could captivate me for hours, when I was just a little kid, familiar with my left hand.
I can clearly feel how I changed since I was forced to give up that natural way. It’s so distinct that even the tiniest memory from my childhood can persist for so long and with such depth.
It’s like you’ve changed the timeline, bent destiny, intervened in the code of your life. Everything follows a different path once entropy is no longer what it was meant to be. Everything changed from that moment, forever.
Even so, there is one thing that is certain, when things have happened and keep happening, you can’t change the past, you can only keep going. But you can start again, to heal that wound. It becomes a reminder, a gentle comfort.
I’ve been retraining myself to write with my left hand for a period of time.
It’s harder than I thought, but the progress is strangely remarkable.
I don’t see improvement when I write every day, but I do see it clearly after taking a break and then starting again.
Maybe that’s the most natural thing and the feeling you get when you awaken an ability that was long forgotten.
I love it, that feeling.
It sounds strange, for someone to relearn how to write with their left hand.
But I’ve smiled with real happiness.
I feel free.
As if I’ve met myself again, in the earliest hours of the morning.
This isn’t just a story about being left-handed.
It’s about protecting what is natural.
It’s about how we should see things.
Not just for ourselves, but for our childs, for the next generation, in every aspect, in every field.
Hữu Phong.