When “fine” isn’t fine: A dyslexia story every parent should hear

Some kids don’t fall apart in public. They save it for home — because it’s the one place they feel safe enough to let go. When teachers and professionals say a child is “fine,” we parents are often left questioning our instincts. They’re the experts, right?

In this episode, psychologist and mom Dr. Arielle Schwartz shares how trusting her gut led her to uncover her son’s dyslexia and sensory differences, and how following that intuition ultimately changed his life.

• Read: Signs of dyslexia at different ages

• Watch: Stars on Earth

• Learn: Eye to Eye mentorship program

• Watch: The Big Picture: Rethinking Dyslexia

Jessica Shaw: Some kids don't fall apart in public or in school. They save it for the safest place they know, and that can be the clue that helps you understand what's really going on.

Dr. Arielle Schwartz: What we would notice is that out in the world, he could kind of hold it together, right? Like when he went to preschool or when he went to kindergarten, he could observe and didn't want too much attention on him. And so he just—it all would build up. And then we would walk through the door of our house, and it would all come out.

And it would come out as defiance, or it would come out as anger, it would come out as loudness, it would come out as physical, literally bouncing off the wallness. Right? Like it was just a little bit of everything.

Jessica: This is "Everybody Gets a Juice Box," a show for all of us parenting kids who think differently, learn differently, act differently, and feel differently.

Dr. Arielle Schwartz is a psychologist, author, podcast host, yoga instructor, and a mom who watched her own kid think, learn, act, and feel differently. Join the club.

She watched how he reacted when he saw books. She watched how he learned the alphabet song. And in one particularly heartbreaking episode, she watched how his differences made him feel about himself.

The thing is, not everyone saw the same things that she did. Again, welcome to the club. How often as a parent have we been told, "Well, it's not this, or it's not that"? And sometimes it's the dilemma of, do I trust the person telling me my kid is fine, or do I trust my instinct as a parent?

Arielle chose the latter, paid attention to what she saw, found the right interventionist, got an evaluation, and as she will tell us, finding the right people to help her son changed his life. Here's her story.

(07:11) Early symptoms of sensory processing and language delays.

Jessica: Dr. Arielle Schwartz, you are a psychologist, you are a parent, and as far as I'm concerned, you are a detective because I loved reading on your website about how you sort of assembled the pieces and put the clues together and patiently and methodically figured out that your son had dyslexia. So first and foremost, tell me about your son.

Arielle: First of all, I actually want to start with where he is right now. He's 20, he's in college, he's thriving, and it's so important, I think, to really locate that. Because I think that if you were to have asked me at the beginning of the story what the future looked like, I was really scared.

And I think that the—you know, if I were listening to this and parenting my six-year-old, it would give me hope. And I have to say that hearing so many other successful people with dyslexia share their stories and receiving that sense of what's possible when we harness the gifts and we celebrate those gave me a lot of sense of what was possible for his future and how to get him there. So I'm going to start there. And now I'm going to kind of roll back. I'm going to roll back to when he was six.

Jessica: Okay. Before you do that, I just want to say I so appreciate what you just said because I feel that to my core as a parent. I think so often when we're in it and when it's like, "Okay, there's this thing and there's that, and do I have to worry about this?"

And it's so hard to see that one year down the line, five years, 10, 15, whatever it is, that there's going to be a different narrative, that there's going to be something that's evolved and changed inevitably. You don't necessarily know which direction, but things change. So I really do appreciate you saying that.

Arielle: So beautiful. Thank you. Thank you. And it's interesting, even in that pause, I was like, "Does the story begin at six?" No, it doesn't. The story begins at two, right? Like really finding like where—before I had the clues, before I even had the word dyslexia.

The story began with sensory processing and with a very sensitive nervous system that basically felt everything so strongly. And the story began with delayed language development in which everything that was felt so strongly that then was in combination with a very bright mind that had so much going on and couldn't get all that was going on in here out to the world.

And so the incredible frustration that would build up in this little boy's body, who is now 6'2" and a mountain bike racer and a ski racer and, you know, they had so much intensity inside of this little being, right? So it was intense.

Jessica: What did that look like? What did it look like for him as a baby or a toddler when you as a parent and you're watching and saying, trying to figure out "What is this?"

Arielle: It looked like an incredible amount of frustration. And the—and it manifested as a lot of meltdowns, right? Like the big messy meltdowns. And as he continued to grow, we—you know, like what we would notice is that out in the world, he could kind of hold it together, right?

Like when he went to preschool or when he went to kindergarten, he could kind of observe and didn't want too much attention on him. And so he just—it all would build up, and then we would walk through the door of our house, and it would all come out.

And it would come out as defiance, or it would come out as anger, it would come out as loudness, it would come out as physical, literally bouncing off the wallness. Right? Like it was just a little bit of everything.

Jessica: Yeah. And so—but as you said, he keeps it together when he goes to school, which is always—I remember as a parent being told, "Well, as long as your kid keeps it together in school, you're fine. You have nothing to worry about. They should fall apart at home." And I remember thinking, but that can't be the beginning, middle, and end of that story.

Arielle: Exactly. Exactly. You know, it was—in some ways, yes, we were grateful that he was also not, if you want to call it "acting out" or that it wasn't rolling over into the school environment. But because of that, there was a lot that got missed.

And so before I get to age six, I want to stay in that early arena just a little bit longer because the good news about the speech delay was that was the first thing that got picked up. And it was the first kind of entry into services that we received.

And so he had a lot of early speech-language therapy, and that was helpful. And then we'd already been introduced because he's our second child and our daughter also had sensory processing challenges. So we'd already been introduced to the world of occupational therapy.

So the OT that worked with her was at the ready for him, and she specializes in sensory processing. And so even at the age of two and a half, three, four, we were getting at the time it was called Integrated Listening Systems—the ILS systems—the Focus system.

We were getting reflex integration, we were getting weighted vests, we were getting like a lot of tools to help regulate this little kid's nervous system. And so that's where the journey started.

But again, because he could hold it together relatively well in the school environment, it was not until first grade that the other symptoms started showing up that pointed—and again, like I'm so grateful we found this out at the age of six, right? Sometimes it's not until 15 or 45 that we discover dyslexia.

Jessica: Or ever.

Arielle: Or ever. Right. So on the one hand, amazing, an amazing story. But what happened is that he was holding it together relatively well at school. He was going to school. I didn't have dyslexia on my radar. I didn't know what to look for.

And he would come home with the little readers, right? The first-grade readers. "The ball is red. The ball is blue. The ball is green." Right? Like the simple, simple little things. And again, my daughter doesn't have dyslexia, so we had the experience when she went through that process of this little girl that would love to sit on the couch and she would open the book and she would read and she was so proud of herself.

And she loved early writing, and she didn't have dyspraxia, so writing was easy for her. And now we have this little six-year-old boy, and when we would pull out the little reader, he would run and hide. And he would be upside down on the couch. He would literally like get inside of, you know, like kitchen cabinets—like anything where—the closet—like he would get as far away from anything having to do with that reader as possible. And we did not know what to make of it.

Jessica: Yeah. When he was—I'm sorry for interrupting you—I'm just curious, when he was before he went—when we're talking about the pre-six-year-old time, when you were getting services, was there any sense of, "Hey, let me prepare you for the landscape of what this could be"? Or is sensory processing a lifelong—like, how much did as a parent did you find out?

I found that there was a lot of self-educating. I mean, you already know things. You're Dr. Arielle Schwartz, so you already have some innate knowledge, some understanding of this. But it's tough, and in some ways, I feel like early intervention—they—I mean, the therapists are, in my experience, have always been incredible, the ones that I have met who I've met. And I also wonder if it would be helpful to sort of say, "Okay, here's what we have now, and these are the places this could go, and these are the places this could go," so that maybe you know what to look out for.

Arielle: Exactly. And in my memory, we never had that conversation. And like you're saying, like I know a lot now as Dr. Arielle Schwartz. I wasn't even a Dr. Arielle Schwartz back then, right? Like we're talking 20 years ago or, you know, 16 if—or 14 depending on what age we're speaking that he was.

But I didn't get my doctorate until after when he was—I don't know what year that was, when he was six or seven. So but you know, I did not have any of this on my radar, and no one placed it on my radar.

So we were literally just like symptoms would show up, and we were treating that symptom, but we weren't taking long view and we weren't—no one ever brought up the possibility of dyslexia as part of the constellation of what we might be looking at.

A lot of people brought up ADHD as a constellation factor, and not that that's not a factor—I think it is for him—but it wasn't the primary factor.

Jessica: Got it. Okay. Back to the kitchen cabinet, yes.

Arielle: Back to the—right, hiding in the closet, all of the things. And I think what was so profoundly painful is that he, as bright as he was, felt different. Right? This is I think the conversation we have again and again, is that he could see that other kids already at the age of six and first grade, other kids could do things he couldn't do. And I'm talking about singing the ABCs.

This is a child who didn't learn to sing the ABCs until fourth grade. And so for an entire four years of school where that's what kids do, they sing the ABCs, or they were learning to count by fives or count by twos or do all of these things—none of that was in his wheelhouse. Not just because of speech-language delays, but because of processing.

And so he started to feel like something was deeply wrong with him. And this is the—probably the most heartbreaking moment for me as a mom, where I came home one day and where he was hiding was in the trash can.

Jessica: That breaks me.

Arielle: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, so we knew there was something and we didn't know what. But here was the moment of recognition, and it came from a movie. Thank goodness for the arts. Thank goodness for movies that get made about these kinds of subjects.

And my mother had watched this movie called "Like Stars on Earth". And it's co-produced by Walt Disney's Foundation and a Bollywood Indian producer of this movie. Basically, it's a three-and-a-half-hour Bollywood movie about a little child with dyslexia.

And his parents don't get it, and the school doesn't get it, and he feels terrible about himself and etc., etc. And then there's the one teacher who gets it and sees it and basically helps him to learn. And my mom watches this movie, and she had just been out to visit us and watched him hiding behind the couch when we would pull out the little reader. And she calls me up and she said, "You have to watch this movie. This is your son."

So my husband and I sit down and watch the movie. I'm bawling my eyes out, right, relating to every part of this movie. And I said, "All right, we're going to go get him a neuro-psych. We're going to go do some testing." And it was so profound to receive back this assessment that said, "Look, he's sitting at the 98th percentile over here in terms of comprehension and all of these other things, and he's sitting at the second percentile over here on these dyslexia measures."

Jessica: When you see him even before you got the evaluation—that moment when you come home and he's in the trash—and you know as a parent he put himself there. What was going through your mind in that moment? I mean, how did you feel right then?

Arielle: For me in that moment, I felt helpless. I felt powerless. I felt like I didn't know how to navigate this and I didn't know how to protect him from the experience he was having in the world.

Receiving a diagnosis and being able to move forward with—and it took a while and we could talk about like the trial and error of finding the right treatment—but once we had a path forward with a diagnosis and a treatment plan, I was like, "Okay, there's something we can do to help him navigate this."

Jessica: Yeah. Because there's—you know, when I think of that moment, I feel like that moment's going to be burned into my brain and it's this—there's this feeling of, on one hand, it's like "How am I going to help going forward as a parent?" And on the other hand, it's "How am I going to process and deal with the profound pain of seeing my child think this is where he should be?"

What about the self-esteem? What about the thing that doesn't get diagnosed? What about the impacts on him as a child who no child should think that?

Arielle: That's right. I mean, there's so much tenderness and I think about all of these children and I also think about how incredibly privileged we were to have the resources to get a diagnosis, to have the resources to seek out treatment, to have the resources to attend to his emotional inner world and the impact of feeling so different.

And it was such a collection, it was such a constellation. Remember, it's a speech delay, it's dyslexia, it's attention-focus, it's dyspraxia. So writing, handwriting—it's dyscalculia. So mathematics. It was large motor coordination challenges.

And this is another one, and I think this is really common too, but it was also gut problems. So he had a physiological challenge as well in the sense that he really, really struggled with digestion and with incredible discomfort.

And it wasn't until fast forward—the whole turning point in the story happens at 12, and we can take our time to get there—but I will say fast forward to age 12, when we pulled him off of gluten and dairy, which his favorite foods were mac and cheese and pizza. So imagine what was happening to his gut.

Jessica: That would overwhelm him, for sure, when you said "Let's cut this out of your diet," yeah.

Arielle: Exactly. And it took a while for us to get that part of the whole equation and it was a massive game changer.

Jessica: Really.

Arielle: Really.

Jessica: And did you find when he was—I know you said he could "hold it together" in school, but when you're talking about just different things going on, how much was the school a partner with you as far as getting tested, as far as, "Hey, this is what we're seeing," not just quite literally with numbers and letters, but emotionally?

(21:46) Jessica and Arielle talk about the school's response and the teachers who stepped up to help.

Arielle: I want to start out by saying that I loved our school district. I absolutely loved our teachers, I absolutely loved our interventionist, and at the beginning stage of this story, nobody caught it. Nobody caught it because they don't do routine screening—or they didn't, maybe they do now, but they didn't 14 years ago.

And his first-grade teacher was not trained in looking for the cues. And because he was super smart, what he did is he figured out how to memorize the book. And so he would go back in and he pretended to read.

And so, yes, he was still in the lowest reading group because I hate those things, but they leveled reading groups that make you feel so terrible because you're in the lowest one. And like all of the things that happened that maybe could have been cues, but they weren't.

And so here's the beautiful part of this story. One is again, we had resources to go seek testing outside of the district, which we did. The person that did our testing came with us with the report to the meeting with the school to help advocate for him to get an IEP, which he got.

The interventionist at the school was amazing. The first-grade teacher came to us and said, "I am so sorry I missed this. I'm not trained in this and I want to change that." And she went out and sought outside training to train herself on how to identify early dyslexia, and our child became her student that she practiced with.

And so she was basically taking a course and we would drive her—him to her house and she practiced what she was learning in her course on dyslexia with our son. So like it was a beautiful outcome, but it took so much work on our own individual parts without the guidance of I think the people that really should have had those skillsets.

Jessica: Yeah. I mean, first of all, I want to say about that teacher—that when you find teachers who are so committed to teaching and to learning, that just, I love hearing that story. But also when—so when you decided to get the evaluation, what was that process like as far as explaining to him, "Okay, hey, here's this is what we're going to do"? And then when you did get the results—or the results plural, whatever it was—did you feel like the lightbulbs went off—like the clouds parted and "Yes, all of this makes sense"?

Arielle: Yes to some of all of that. So let's see, what did we tell him about the evaluation? "You're going to go spend some time doing puzzles with a really nice lady." Remember, this is a six-year-old, and she was really nice.

And she totally knew how to do this kind of evaluation. She'd worked at a children's hospital at this time, she was working in her own private practice. And we broke it up into two settings so that it wasn't too, too long. But it was still like two four-hour testing sessions or something like that.

But I think she made it fun enough and he felt safe with her. And that has to be the keyword in my opinion. And then once we had a diagnosis and we could say to him, "Your brain works differently than some other kids and we're going to get you some extra support," and we—I didn't know who, what, where—like what is the best way to approach this?

And I think that was also like the next level of a really tricky phase because there's a lot of really expensive intervention programs out there that want to basically sell you on theirs being the way to go.

And I got a little bit caught up in "I want the best for him" and this and that. And unfortunately, the very first person that we brought him to was very, I want to say like profoundly educated in how do you treat dyslexia, but did not do what that person that did the testing knew how to do, which is meet him in a six-year-old boy body who needed to do these practices in a really creative embodied way. Because trying to teach things in a rigid way for him, he literally just would freeze and hide.

Jessica: Yeah. And you—you've spoken about this before, that there is this kind of gift of dyslexia in the sense that someone with—a kid with dyslexia, adult also, might approach things differently, may just think differently, may find a different path to a destination that maybe someone without dyslexia would go a different path. And I can imagine that it's so important to have someone who's working with your child who has a real innate understanding of that.

Arielle: Exactly. Because no matter what age we are, we can tell when someone is deeply respecting us, deeply tuning into our excellence and our intelligence and our expertise.

And so it took about three trials of different providers and interventionists until we found the person that we called the Ian whisperer—my son's name is Ian—and we called her the Ian whisperer because she totally knew how to work with him and how to be with him and how to celebrate him.

And he felt so safe with her. He couldn't wait to go to Miss Judy, right? And she had puppets and she had sand and she had sensory tools and she was playful and she had a singsongy voice—all of the things that really softened his nervous system so that he was open to receiving.

Jessica: When you got the diagnosis, what did the evaluation say? Did it come back to you with dyslexia, or was it like this, this, this?

Arielle: It was—the language on it was something like a reading disorder, right? Because the language I think the official language within the diagnostic coding was that. And so I—I said "Is that dyslexia?" Right?

At that point I was starting to do my own reading and decoding dyslexia and trying to just like gather all of the data. And she said "Yes, this is—this is equated to that." Okay, great. And possible ADHD, possible dyscalculia, and dyspraxia. So we like literally had you know our—all of our D's down the list.

And okay, so that we could bring back and again qualified for services also in the school. So we had our Miss Judy outside of school, and then we had Candice in the school and—I mean, I'm giving these people names just because like they changed his life and our lives.

And again, Candice also got him, helped him to feel safe. He did a lot of learning with a few other kids that were also being kind of pulled out of class. But in the safety of her room and honestly being pulled out of class was good for him. It's not good for everyone, but for him, it was a lower-stimulating environment. It was learning with just four other kids. It was much more fine-tuned and refined to really meet him, and some of it was one-on-one. So there was both.

And then he also had his speech pathologist and she was great. And so we had this like team that got him. And that mostly worked first grade, second grade. We didn't have a good third-grade teacher for him, and she missed a lot and that was another hard year.

Jessica: That's a tough part. Because even as I'm hearing you and I'm like, "Wow, this is amazing. You have your people outside of school, you have your people in school," and as a parent, there's a—I know I always felt like how much advocating do I have to do versus, okay, they say they've got this covered.

And you don't want to be like that parent who's like all over the school and do this, do this, do this. On the other hand, very often we need to make sure our kids are getting what they need. So I'm curious what was your experience as far as how involved you had to be.

Arielle: We were pretty involved. And I think that especially because it got missed, there was another student that I think they must have met maybe in that third-grade class with that not-great teacher. And that mom who had also identified her child as dyslexia—with dyslexia—and she and I kind of joined together.

And she—I was working kind of full-time outside of being a mom and she had the time to basically create an organization for parents of kids with dyslexia. So we also had this like kind of amazing little budding community.

But in terms of advocating, like we did a lot. And especially when we bumped up against a teacher that we felt didn't get him and he—that was where things ramped up again and he was really struggling in school was in third grade. Especially as math got more complicated, reading got more complicated, and I feel like the shame wove itself back into the picture that year that we had been like so tenderly trying to unwind.

Jessica: Yeah. Was he coming home and just kind of hating school? Was that your warning—your sign that you needed?

Arielle: Thankfully we never got to the "hate school" point, although I think that could have happened and I certainly know that happens. But it was just so much more digestive distress, so much more emotional distress, again like so much pushback around ever sitting down to do any homework at this point, especially math.

And so then we brought in like another interventionist that just did math with him. And one thing—one gift that I have to say is that we took ourselves out of the equation of trying to do homework with him. Because it was literally—it had the potential of destroying our relationships with him as his parents.

It was so much pushback. And when we brought in, you know, Judy who did the reading with him or the other people that did the math with him, it took us out of the power struggle and it let us be his supportive loving parents rather than feeling like we were stuck in this power dynamic.

Jessica: Yeah. And also, I mean, how did that feel to you when you're kind of—you have you get this diagnosis, you put things in place, you've got two great years where everything is working, you have your team, and then all of a sudden, it's sort of what you were saying earlier about you don't know that 10-15 years down the line things are going to be different. You also don't know that two years down the line things are going to go in a direction you don't want them to.

Arielle: Exactly.

Jessica: What is that? I mean, are you as a parent just like devastated?

Arielle: I don't know that I went to devastation, but I just went into, "Well, we're going to have to do this outside of the school, or we're going to have to do this in a different way. We're going to have to be really creative about this." And thankfully things that helped—a few things that helped.

One was that the same friend, her name is Karen, that started this BV Kid—she started this whole organization to help parents with kids with dyslexia—she had the connections to bring Jonathan Mooney to Boulder.

(33:50) Mentorship and seeing neurodiverse role models

Arielle: And we attended a talk with him and it was profound.

Jessica: Why don't you say who Jonathan Mooney is?

Arielle: Okay. So an advocate, a public speaker, a leader in the field of what I love the term neurodiversity, because it's standing away from this idea that there's like a neuro-normative, but really standing into advocating for the creative intelligence and the fact that we often need a village to basically help us become successful.

And so he came to Boulder. We saw him twice. Around the same time, we had a film festival showing of "Dyslexia: The Big Picture" in Boulder. We got to watch the movie twice.

The first time my son looks at me—and for anyone that hasn't seen this movie, go see this movie, it's profoundly inspiring—and my son turns to me and he goes, "Oh, I could be a doctor. Oh, I could, you know, like literally I can go to college." Like all of the things that he could see were possible were being displayed. And then we got to sit with other parents and do a Q&A with the filmmakers. I mean, it was extraordinary.

Jessica: That—which is also because it's in some ways I know I have felt like "of course" in that moment. When I hear you saying that, I think my response would have been "Of course you can do that." And then you have that moment of insight into how your child thinks, of "Oh, I didn't even realize that you thought that this wasn't your world."

Arielle: Right. Right. That this wasn't your world. Okay, turning point number three. Like huge turning points. Project Eye-to-Eye. So Project Eye-to-Eye is the mentorship program that creates mentor partnerships between in some cases high school and middle school or high school and elementary.

So fast forward—some of our big turning points really all occurred constellationed around age 12. Age 12 we changed his diet—game changer. Like one of the things that happened also in middle school, and one of them was the P.E. teacher.

So again, like we have all these like little angels that show up along the way. And he really, really struggled with classic sports, like soccer, tennis, I don't know, ball sports, right? Baseball. That coordination around ball sports and team sports—it was a lot of pressure, it was a lot of struggle and it impacted again self-esteem.

And so he gets into this class kind of by chance that's called, I think it was something like fitness and conditioning. That was the name of it. And it was all agility, body-based, weight-based movement exercises. And he loved this class. And he could do these things.

He had this class four days a week. He didn't have it Wednesdays. So Monday, Tuesday, he would come home clearheaded, grounded, focused, picks up a book and reads it. We're like, "What's going on? This is really interesting." Sitting down doing his homework at the table focused. We're like, "What is that about?"

Wednesday, not at all. Thursday, Friday, he can focus. We're like, "Okay, what's happening with this?" And we watched it for an entire semester. He signs up for the class again the next semester. He signs up for the class the whole next year. So he has two years of a class that became his medicine.

Age 12, we get him into an Eye-to-Eye mentorship program that's happening at our middle school. And he's partnered with a University of Colorado student in a group, and I think there must have been about 10 kids and 10 mentors in this program.

And after school, they would meet, they would do art projects, and they would sit in a circle and the mentors would model. "I have ADHD or I have dyslexia and I'm studying astrophysics or I'm studying medicine or I'm studying," you know, like they would model what they're doing as their university student degrees and how they de-shamed their diagnosis.

Massive game changer. Right? And he would come home from school and all of a sudden he would start to talk about his dyslexia like it was something to be proud of. And I was like, "Wow, now that's cool."

Jessica: I mean, and what—it's just that is so huge. I mean, that is so, so huge for a child to who has been told maybe only by a third-grade teacher, but you never know. Kids say things, other teachers—and there and then to say, "Oh, and look at my community and look at the people in the mirror that are reflecting me back. You know, that are reflecting back at me." That is so powerful. And in some ways something that no therapist can give you and no one else. It's like you need to live it to believe it.

Arielle: Yeah. I think that's so key, right? Like he was in therapy as well, right? I'm a psychologist, so of course I'm going to give him everything he could possibly benefit from. But he struggled with therapy. But when he went to the mentorship group and felt that like "I'm not alone, I belong in some way, and look at these amazing people," that was amazing. It brings tears to my eyes. I'm just—I'm emotional about this, so.

Jessica: Yeah. I mean, it's—it's extraordinary. It's extraordinary that that organization exists. It's extraordinary just the different—the de-stigmatization—is that the word?

Arielle: De-stigmatization.

Jessica: De-stigmatization. I was like, I know that's not right. De-stigmatization. And I love that because there might be whoever was there saying, "I have ADHD and I'm doing this," guess what? They might be so creative because of that. "I have dyslexia and I'm doing this," and that dyslexia might have led that young adult to approach something wildly differently and in a wonderful way. And instead of being other, less than, it's a whole other world.

Arielle: Yeah. Yeah. There's a few connections that I'm making as we're speaking about this. One is the ways in which parenting both of my kids with sensory processing and learning differences helped me to understand myself differently.

And I had a lot of sensory experiences growing up, but we didn't have that language back then. I've always been a bit of an out-of-the-box thinker, right? And I didn't have ways of understanding my own neurological uniqueness and gifts.

And as I'm raising them, I'm like, "Oh, that's why I can't shop at Whole Foods." Like it's way overstimulating. Right? Like there were all these little lightbulbs that went off for me about like, "Oh, that's why I want to sit and be really quiet in a meeting for the first half hour and then I'll get an image or an insight or I'll understand what's not being said."

Right? And it may not be—have shown up for me as dyslexia, but I get the the kind of differential creative intelligences that start to—that we start to show up when we stop looking in just this one lane of intelligence.

Jessica: Dr. Arielle Schwartz, I—it's a really wonderful story. I mean, the part about never eating pizza makes me a little sad, but.

Arielle: But listen, there are a few gluten-free, dairy-free pizzas out there. And luckily in Boulder we can even go out and order them somewhere, you know? They're not the same, but they're pretty darn good.

Jessica: Thanks for listening to "Everybody Gets a Juice Box." Our show is hosted by me, Jessica Shaw. It's produced by Cody Nelson, and video is produced by Calvin Knie and edited by Jesse DiMartino.

Briana Berry is our production director and Neil Drumming is our editorial director. If you have any questions for us or ideas for future episodes, write me an email or send a voice memo to podcast@understood.org.

This show is brought to you by Understood.org. Our executive directors are Laura Key, Scott Cocchiere, and Jordan Davidson. Understood is a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering people with learning and thinking differences like ADHD and dyslexia. If you want to help us continue this work, donate at understood.org/give.