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The original was posted on /r/tifu by /u/Ok_Necessary7667 on 2026-06-17 04:05:43+00:00.

As a child I was commonly hit in elementary school with the "left hand makes the L" thing. Like any time they'd want us to do something with our left hand, they'd have us make Ls and we'd have to point out the proper L.

The problem always was, I could never tell which one was an L. People would show me, and point out that the left side always looked "more like an L" - I merited this to the 90ish degree angle my peers, parents, and teachers seemed to create.

I am hypermobile, especially in my hands. My Ls would always be wrong, because my thumb would extend past where the "L" should be, and in my mind, I couldn't make what looked physically like an L and therefore I could never see the L. I knew what side was left because I wrote with my left hand, and people finally gave up trying to teach me the L.

Recently, I hurt my left hand. I can extend it a limited range for me, but it's a range that's normal for the average person. I tried again to make an L, and as I sat there and looked at my hands I realized that the reason your hand makes an L is not because of some magic right angle, but because that's the way the letter L faces.

Tl;dr: it took me 28 years of life to figure out which way an L faces.