Welcome Lefties and Southpaws!

There are a number of hand, foot, and eye tests that you can try on yourself to see how lefty you really are. But in general terms, a left-handed person is anyone who writes with their left hand. Writing is the best starting point to define your dominant side because it is the base line of coordination and fine motor skills. However, your writing hand doesn’t peg you down as one or the other. Many left-handed people actually prefer to write with their right hand and vice versa. For example, PGA tour golfer Phil Mickelson is a left-handed player even though he writes with his right hand. 

Mixed-handedness, or cross-dominance, is when people tend to excel at various tasks using their share of both hands. Someone may be a left-handed writer but do everything from throwing a baseball to pouring a cup of tea with their right. Other folks are able to equally perform any kind of task with both of their hands, and they are called ambidextrous. True ambidexterity is very rare. But many natural left-handers actually become almost ambidextrous through the course of their life, just because they live in a world geared heavily toward righties. As a result, many eventually learn to cope. But the journey to get there is long, stressful, and often wrought with dangerous accidents along the way.