Left Right and Faces

I have always had difficulty telling left from right. People who don’t have this problem can’t usually understand why it should be so difficult: right is the hand you write with (unless you’re left handed), so just think of that and you’ll be fine. Not so.

Before I was healed I needed a clear 3 seconds to go on a mental journey to work out left or right. So, if you were a passenger in a car I was driving and you said “turn left here”, you’d be in with a 50-50 chance I’d turn right instead. You would have to give me at least 3 seconds warning, after which I would point which way was going to turn (I wouldn’t always get it right even then), or you would you would have to say “turn off to my side” or “turn off to your side”. My mum also has difficulty in this area, so that may have something to do with it as well. My son also has had this problem, but he has a trick up his sleeve. When he was young, he put his arm through the glass in the front door, leaving a large scar in his left arm. Thus, whenever left or right was said to him, you would see him pulling back his sleeve.

When I was healed, the 3 seconds went down to one second, so now I am usually OK with directions in the car, unless I am distracted. I could probably improve on that with practice.

Although I am right handed, I am sort-of partially ambidextrous. I can’t write with my left hand, but many things I do in a way that most people think of as left handed. In my mind, I have felt symmetrical, with no real distinction between left and right; whereas I think most people have a sense that the left half or them is different from the right, in that the right leads and the left follows (if you’re right handed), or that the right does things and the left helps. I’ve heard an explanation of dyslexia that it is the spirit being the wrong way round in the body, and that praying for them to be turned round has given the person a spinning sensation and resulted in them no longer being dyslexic. If there’s any sense in that for me, then it’s more that I kept switching from facing one way to the other.

Another thing I find rather strange and inexplicable, is that I’m not very good at recognising faces, and this hasn’t really changed. I don’t know if it’s related, though. When I watch films and the scene changes, the actors’ clothes also often change., and so I lose my reference as to who’s who. I have to keep asking my wife who the people are in each scene, and who they were in the previous scenes.

This proves to be really embarrassing in real life. There was one recent incident at work where I was telling someone off for not delivering what they were supposed to. They said, “I never agreed to do that. You must be thinking of someone else”. I said, “No, you said x and y on such-and-such a date”. “That sounds more like so-and-so”. “You’re not so-and-so then?” “No, do I look like him?”