By Sheri Boelter

There is a specific kind of thank you that women learn to say. Not the thank you for a gift or a kindness. The thank you for being taken seriously. The thank you for being spoken to as an equal. The thank you that sounds like gratitude but is really an apology – for needing to be seen at all.

I know this thank you well. I said it for decades.

I spent thirty years as an executive leaver for behavioral health nonprofits. I walked into boardrooms and community events and leadership tables with the credentials, the vision, and the track record. And I watched, over and over, as the room looked past me to the man standing at my side – a male employee, a colleague, sometimes someone I had hired – and offered him the firm handshake. The direct question. The assumption of authority.

Once, walking into a community event, I fell into conversation with an older Black man who was talking about the prejudice he experienced. He said, with certainty, that I wouldn’t understand what that felt like.

I said: You really don’t think I know what that feels like? Let’s walk into this room together. Let’s see who they greet first with a firm handshake. Let’s see who they assume is the CEO – you or me.

We walked in. They greeted him first. Firm handshake. Eye contact. The assumption of authority.

Because he is a man. And I am a woman.

We both knew something in that moment about what it means to walk through the world in a body that other people have already decided doesn’t lead. We were different in almost every way. We shared that one unbearable thing.

Here is what I want to tell you about the years I spent in those rooms: I never stopped walking in. I never apologized out loud for being there. I learned early how to hold a room, how to command a table, how to make my presence known.

But internally? I was still thanking people for the handshake I deserved.

That is the thing about the apology women learn to carry. It doesn’t always come out of our mouths. Sometimes it lives in the way we soften our voices before sharing a strong opinion. In the way we qualify expertise we’ve spent decades earning. In the way we feel a small, private flush of gratitude when a man in a room of men treats us as an equal – as if basic respect were a gift instead of a baseline.

The performance of confidence is not the same as confidence. I performed it beautifully for thirty years. It wasn’t until my career was publicly dismantled, until I lost everything I had built my identity around, that I was forced to do the work I had been avoiding my entire professional life: figure out who I was when no one was watching. When no room needed to be commanded. When there was no handshake left to earn.

What I found, on the other side of that loss, was something I had never had before – not in thirty years of leadership, not in a single boardroom or community stage or national conference. I found that I no longer needed the room to confirm what I already knew.

I belonged to myself. Finally, completely, without apology.

That is not something a handshake can give you. It is not something a title can give you. It is not something that comes from performing confidence so well that even you start to believe it.

It comes from the inside. And it stays there – even when the room looks past you. Even when they give your handshake to someone else. Even when they get it wrong.

So here is the question I want to leave you with: Are you performing confidence, or do you actually have it? And if there’s a difference – what would it take to close that gap?

Sheri Boelter spent three decades leading behavioral health nonprofits and is the author of the forthcoming memoir Not What They Said I Was, a book about dyslexia, identity, and the long work of learning to stop proving and start belonging.

By Sheri Boelter

Picture a classroom. A teacher calls your name. You are supposed to read aloud from the page in front of you – the same page everyone else has been following along with, the same words your classmates seem to find perfectly obvious. You find your place. You begin. And then, somewhere in the second or third line, the words stop cooperating.

Not because you aren’t trying. Not because you don’t care. But because your brain processes language differently, and no one in that room knows it yet – including you.

You lose your place. You stumble. The room goes quiet in that particular way that means everyone noticed. And somewhere deep inside you, a belief begins to form that will follow you for years: something is wrong with me.

This is what dyslexia feels like from the inside. Not as a clinical definition. Not as a checklist of symptoms. But as a lived experience of growing up in a world built for a kind of brain you don’t have – and being told, repeatedly and in a hundred small ways, that the problem is you.

The Label That Made Everything Worse

When I was a child, I was diagnosed as “Learning Disabled.” Those two words were meant to explain something. Instead, they only confirmed what the classroom had already taught me: I was broken. The label didn’t come with tools or understanding or any map for how my mind actually worked. It came with a different room – the Resource Room – and the quiet, unmistakable message that I needed to be separated from the rest.

“Learning Disabled” tells you what you can’t do. It defines you by your deficits. It says: here is the standard, and you fall short of it. For a child still trying to understand herself, that diagnosis doesn’t create clarity. It creates shame.

The Diagnosis That Changed Everything

I was eighteen years old – in my first year of college – when someone finally gave me the right word: dyslexia. And with it, for the first time, came something the earlier diagnosis never offered: an explanation of how my brain worked, and tools to use that knowledge.

It wasn’t a verdict. It was a map.

Dyslexia is not a reading problem. It is a language processing difference – a brain that routes information differently, that may struggle with decoding written words but often excels at pattern recognition, big-picture thinking, and seeing connections that linear thinkers miss entirely. Research consistently shows that dyslexic minds are disproportionately represented among entrepreneurs, innovators, artists, and leaders. Not despite their dyslexia. In many cases, because of it.

That eighteen-year-old version of me had spent nearly a decade believing her mind was a problem to be managed. What she learned that year was that her mind was a different kind of instrument – one the education system hadn’t known how to play.

What the Dyslexic Mind Can Do

I went on to spend three decades leading behavioral health nonprofits – fighting for children the system had labeled and discarded, building organizations from the ground up, and sitting at tables where the stakes were high and the margin for error was low. The mind that had struggled to read aloud in fourth grade turned out to be exceptionally good at seeing what others missed: the child behind the behavior, the strength beneath the diagnosis, the potential inside the person everyone else had written off.

My dyslexic brain gave me the ability to hold complexity without needing to simplify it. It gave me empathy for anyone who learned differently, because I knew firsthand what it cost to exist in a world that wasn’t designed for you. It made me a leader who looked for potential instead of performance – because I had been the child whose performance never reflected what she was actually capable of.

None of that erases the hard years. None of it gives back the classroom moments or the Resource Room or the decade of believing I was less than I was.

But it reframes them.

What I Want You to Know

If you are a parent watching your child struggle in a classroom that doesn’t know how to see them – fight for the right diagnosis. Not the one that tells them what they can’t do, but the one that explains how they learn and gives them the tools to use it.

If you are an adult who was labeled slow, lazy, or not enough – and who has carried that verdict quietly for years – I want you to consider that the verdict may have been wrong. Not about the difficulty you experienced, but about what it meant.

The mind that loses its place reading aloud in class is often the same mind that, given the right tools and the right understanding, will one day refuse to give up on people everyone else has already written off.

That is not a deficit.

That is a different kind of intelligence.

Sheri Boelter spent three decades leading behavioral health nonprofits and is the author of the forthcoming memoir Not What They Said I Was, a book about dyslexia, identity, and the long work of learning to stop proving and start belonging.

Stop Proving. Start Belonging.

On March 16th, the President of the United States sat in the Oval Office and said this:

“Honestly, I’m all for people with learning disabilities, but not for my president. I don’t think a president should have learning disabilities.”

He was talking about Governor Gavin Newsom’s dyslexia. He called him a “low-IQ person.” He said “everything about him is dumb.”

I am not here to talk about politics. I am here to talk about the child who just heard that.

The nine-year-old standing at a chalkboard right now while her classmates laugh. The boy who hides his reading book under his desk because the words won’t stay still. The teenager who has stopped raising her hand because being wrong in public feels like it might kill her. The adult who has spent decades achieving extraordinary things while quietly believing, in the place Mr. President, I Was That Child

where the labels landed, that she is still the slow one. Still not enough.

I know that child. I was that child.

I was nine years old when I was labeled learning disabled. No further explanation. No roadmap. Just a designation that told me something was wrong with me – without ever telling me what it was or what it meant or what I was actually capable of. I carried that label through every classroom, every hallway, every moment of public humiliation, for nine more years before anyone gave me a more specific answer. I was eighteen when I was finally diagnosed with dyslexia.

Nine years of knowing something was different. Nine years without the language to understand what that difference actually was.

What filled that gap was not truth. It was the verdict of teachers who called me slow, lazy, and not enough. And in the absence of the right story, I accepted theirs.

What the President said is not just wrong. It is dangerous in a specific and documented way.

According to the International Dyslexia Association, there is absolutely no correlation between dyslexia and intelligence. The condition affects roughly 20% of the population and has no connection to a person’s overall intelligence, according to the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity. What it affects is the way the brain processes written language – not the capacity to think, lead, create, innovate, or yes, govern.

The list of people with dyslexia who have led at the highest levels is long. Entrepreneurs. Scientists. Artists. Surgeons. CEOs. Leaders who succeeded not despite their dyslexic minds but in many cases because of them – because dyslexia often produces exactly the kind of thinking the world needs most: the ability to see connections others miss, to hold a problem from multiple angles at once, to find creative solutions where conventional thinkers see dead ends.

Governor Newsom has described his dyslexia as a superpower – saying it gave him the freedom to work harder, to develop more resilience, and calling it a blessing, particularly in his political career. I understand that completely. My dyslexic mind is the reason I could walk into a room and read what wasn’t being said. It is the reason I could hold the complexity of an entire organization in my head while everyone else was still looking at the spreadsheet. It is the reason I fought so hard for children who were labeled and discarded – because I knew exactly what it felt like to have someone in authority decide who you were before you had the chance to show them.

What was said in the Oval Office on Monday will reach children who are already struggling. It will reach parents who are already frightened. It will reach adults who have spent their whole lives outrunning a label and who just heard the most powerful person in the country confirm their worst fear about themselves.

To those people – and especially to the children – I want to say this clearly:

Your mind is not a deficit. It is not a disqualifier. It is not evidence that you are less than anyone in any room you will ever walk into.

The people who labeled you didn’t have the language to understand you. That was their limitation, not yours.

Governor Newsom responded to the President by posting: “To every kid with a learning disability: don’t let anyone – not even the President of the United States – bully you. Dyslexia isn’t a weakness. It’s your strength.”

He’s right. And I want to add this:

The moment someone in authority tells you that your mind disqualifies you – that is the moment to pay closest attention to what your mind is actually capable of. Because in my experience, the people who get labeled early are often the ones the world needs most.

I was nine years old when they told me something was wrong with me. I was eighteen when I finally learned what to call it. I was fifty-three when I finished writing the book about what I built anyway.

This is exactly why that book exists.

Sheri Boelter spent three decades leading behavioral health nonprofits and is the author of the forthcoming memoir Not What They Said I Was, a book about dyslexia, identity, and the long work of learning to stop proving and start belonging. Read more at sheriboelter.com and subscribe to her newsletter, Stop Proving. Start Belonging. at sheriboelter.substack.com.