Last March, I decided to take the CHSPE, an exam that would grant me my certificate of high school proficiency if I passed. The exam consisted of nearly 200 multiple-choice questions, followed by an on-demand essay. I spent months studying for this test and had to drive up to a testing site in LA in order to take it. 

I arrived at the testing site at 6:30 in the morning, feeling underprepared as I lined up with hundreds of other high-schoolers. 

Gripping my two pre-sharpened #2 pencils and my water bottle that had been stripped of its label, I walked into the testing classroom. Within seconds, my already fearful eyes were met with a new horror. 

Right-handed desks. 

Dozens of them. 

You see, I’m left-handed. I scanned the room for a single left-handed desk, but my search yielded nothing. I found myself seated at a desk, my right arm propped up by the table, my left hand swinging lifelessly to my side. 

The next four hours were spent uncomfortably readjusting myself and propping up my left leg to support the weight of my exhausted left arm. This feeling of exhaustion is a feeling my left hand knows all too well. 

These hardships trace back to Kindergarten, when the entire class would follow step-by-step arts and crafts, mirroring the teacher’s hands on the projector. While my entire table would be coloring or gluing their already-cut papers together, I sat there, figuring out how to hold my scissors, scissors that are made for right-handed people. You can’t find left-handed scissors in Target’s back-to-school section. 

At age 4, when I couldn’t even correctly spell my full name, I had to force myself to use scissors, a foreign object to my uncoordinated right hand. I didn’t even know my left from my right at the time, yet I was expected to understand how to mirror everything with my right hand, due to the lack of left-handed representation in the world of school supplies. 

To my Kindergarten self, it was clear that this world was not made for my left-handedness. 

In third grade, we had our cursive unit. Every day we were given different worksheets, focusing on different letters of the alphabet. We learned to integrate the ending of one letter into the beginning of the next, dragging our hands across the page. 

My teacher never had to double-check if I completed each worksheet, because the ink smeared all over my hand gave it away. After completing any assignment, ink and led covered my hand, starting from the tip of my pinky down to the start of my left wrist. Traces of mechanical pencils, regular pencils, colored pencils, and pens were all over my left hand, as if it were the victim of an explosion in my pencil case. None of my right-handed friends went to recess with smudges all over their hands, but I did.

Instead of washing my hands for the amount of time it takes to sing the alphabet, like my classmates were told to, I had to spend, on average, 20 more seconds scrubbing the lead off of my hand. Those 20 seconds add up. Those 20 seconds went completely overlooked by my right-handed peers, who had left me in the bathroom to struggle as they got a head start in a game of tag. 

In sixth-grade math class, which was already torture in and of itself, we used to get called to the front of the classroom to solve different problems on the board. I’d get called on, and my heart would race as I shakily solved my assigned problem. 

When I’d take a step back and look at my work, half of it would be missing. Unless I wrote with my hand at a 45-degree angle, my left hand erased all of my work, though it was likely incorrect anyway. Since then, I just try to avoid being called on altogether, but when  I inevitably do, my hand is always awkwardly angled, trying to preserve my hard work. 

I took the CHSPE in March, and our results were mailed to us in April. I knew I didn’t pass; while testing, my entire brain capacity had been focused on the lack of support for  my left hand. To my surprise, I ended up passing and earned my certificate of proficiency. 

I don’t see this certificate as one for proficiency, however, but as one of perseverance. The world is not made for us lefties, but the lead coating my hand is a  battle scar from the war that I have been forced to fight, and am slowly winning.