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.