Left Alone

When I was five years old my father was sent to Africa on missionary assignment for the catholic church. I know I didn’t cry and that I wasn’t worried, but that’s about all I can remember. It wasn’t that I didn’t love my father or that I was an unusually brave five year old, I just didn’t feel anything.
   
When the nuns took me up the old wooden staircase towards the dorm rooms I felt a cold draft rush up my back. I remember thinking it was colder and darker than most of the places I’ve ever been. I had arrived at St Josephs Catholic boarding school, my new home for the next four years.

The punishment started as soon as classes began, Sister bernadette was the first to notice that I was using my left hand whilst writing. I was instructed in no uncertain terms to begin using my right hand immediately. As simple as that instruction seems, I couldn’t seem to implicate it.

I tried hard to remember - especially after the first few smacks - but old habits die hard. Every time a new class began I would revert back to my left, it felt so strong and natural, I couldn’t help it.  After the first month at my new school My left hand was so badly bruised that I couldn’t write with it if I tried. The boys in the dorms had begun punching me in my left arm and sometimes the left leg. At night I would lay awake in my bed thinking about Africa and my father, I wondered if there were children in Africa who were left handed, I prayed for them.

I thought obsessively of my left side. At first I wouldn’t turn into the classroom on my left side in case the nuns saw me, after a while, I wouldn’t turn on my left side at all which led to me occasionally doing 180 degree turns to change direction or enter a room.

My only solace during these years was sought through my imagination. Whenever I got a chance I would think of a world where both arms and both legs could be used equally, I created characters and we would all run around doing everyday things with both hands and legs, after the four years at St Josephs were over i had created an entire universe of ambidextrous friends and fellows.

It’s easy for me to look back now and see how I had psychologically created a coping mechanism within my mind, some kind of world where I wasn’t a sinner as the nuns would say. It took me a long time and a lot of therapy to understand why I would ever change, it was so natural for me to live the way I did.


I’ve been working with schizophrenia sufferers for fifteen years now, I have a son of my own, who happens to be right handed, and I’m happy. I’m grateful for my time at St Josephs If it wasn’t for those early years I might never have taken the interest I did in the brain and it’s mechanisms.

Whenever I walk into my office at the hospital now, I always make a point of turning on my left, just to remind myself of how far I’ve come. 

D.A.Cook