mine is a life of imitation

i’ve always lived in a world that wasn’t built for me. from scissors to desks, zippers to ladles, everything is designed with a right-handed assumption. i’m left-handed—not metaphorically, not rebelliously, but literally—and that one simple trait has made my life a quiet exercise in imitation. i’ve had to teach myself how to live in a mirror, to flip every gesture i saw and make it fit my own hands. no one in my family is left-handed, and no one could show me how to thread a needle or hold a cricket bat in a way that didn’t feel slightly off. i have been reminded multiple times how hard it was to teach me writing; the pencil grip was the hardest part. so i learned to watch. to study. and then to find my own way.

i don’t like asking for help. not because i’m arrogant, or because i believe i have all the answers, but because my earliest experiences taught me that when i needed help, no one knew how to give it. i remember struggling to tie shoelaces the “normal” way, only to give up and invent a backward version that worked for me. people offered advice—sometimes helpful, often well-intentioned—but rarely useful as it was. they didn’t understand that i couldn’t just follow instructions step by step. i had to reshape them.

that’s the thing with being left-handed: advice is almost always a template you have to rewrite. even when i do ask for help, it’s not for a solution—i’m asking to see how they do it, so i can dismantle it and rebuild it to suit me. i never apply guidance directly; i tweak it, reorient it, and patch it into my reality. it’s not stubbornness. it’s survival. it’s the method of someone who grew up realizing that most systems weren’t made with them in mind.

what frustrates me most is when people insist on helping, when they don’t leave room for me to try, to fail, to figure it out myself. their advice, while sometimes correct, is rarely sensitive to the fact that i’ve already adapted. i’ve already found workarounds. i don’t need ready-made answers—i need space to explore.

to live as a left-hander is to become a quiet engineer of the everyday. it’s to watch someone open a jar and think, “okay, now let me try it my way.” it’s to see the world not as a set of instructions, but as a puzzle with missing pieces. maybe that’s why i don’t feel comfortable following other people’s paths exactly. i don’t trust that their way will fit me. i trust myself to notice the difference.

so yes, mine is a life of imitation. but not one of blind copying. it’s a life of watching, adapting, rewriting, and resisting the urge to do things “just because that’s how it’s done.” i imitate; but only to find what works for me.

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