Life is hard and it’s hard for everyone. To those who write with the “abnormal” or left hand, however, it provides ample (but minor) annoyances that the other 90 percent of the population doesn’t notice or experience. These are the invisible nuisances of sorts. They’re the problems that people can reasonably say, “Get over it” to; they’re not actively harmful, but definitely infuriating sometimes.

Everything is geared toward righties – everything from notebooks to the tiny desks you see in lecture halls. Just try walking into those rooms and fnding a leftie desk. Many a college student has attested that it will be in the corner, or not even there at all. And for high school students, spiral-bound notebooks are the worst.

“Your whole hand is always scraping the edge,” said sophomore Nicole Spektor. “You pull back and the whole inside of your palm and up the side of your hand are covered in tiny ink dots.”

The annoyances go on and on. “I often drag my hand across the paper when writing so I constantly smudge everything,” adds sophomore Ellie Hankin.

However, fellow lefties agree that these problems are better than what plagued us in the past. In the 1980s, my own mother was forced to sit on her left hand and write with her other one, until my grandmother finally stopped the teachers. Further back in my family history, an aunt who taught in the 1940s had one child’s parents schedule a meeting with her over their son’s left-handedness, convinced he was a deviant criminal just because of that. In some cultures, being left-handed is not even seen as a changeable problem like in these cases, but a surefire sign of sorcery or wickedness. In fact, many representations of the devil show a left-handed being. Though it seems surprising that such an ordinary thing about a person would cause so much misconception, resentment, and poor treatment, it still manages to even to this day.

Even language seems to be against the concept of “left.” The word in Latin for left is sinistra, which is two letters off from the word sinister, meaning ominous. German for “left-handed” is linkisch, meaning awkward or clumsy. Calling a person a left-hander in Russian, or levja, is an insult. In Italian, mancino is the word for it, used alternately in the language to mean untrustworthy. As for English, the word “left” comes from an Anglo-Saxon one that originally meant “weak.”

Overall, despite many languages and cultures’ adverse attitudes toward the left-handed orientation, the status is not a staple of identity to a community in the way gender, race, religion, and sexuality are. Left versus right-handed is a genetic factor, the same as blue eyes to more common brown eyes. Though seen as a staple of evil in some places, it is positive in others, and does not define a person who is one, aside from being a slightly unique thing about them. For example, though it has been claimed that left-handed people are geniuses, the same could be said of any right-handed person. For anyone who claims they are evil, any right-handed person could be as well. And if we feel isolated or outnumbered as southpaws, the last consolation is to take stock of our numbers. If one in 10 people living is left-handed, that means that there are about 700 million lefties on the planet. It’s hardly an insignificant number. So there’s no excuse to feeling left out.