NPR · 11 hours ago

Middle Schooler with Dyslexia Discusses Her Diagnosis

Cora Walsh spent years knowing only that reading was hard - harder than it should have been, harder than it was for her friends, no matter how much she tried. It took nearly five years to learn she had dyslexia, and two more years of patient, methodical tutoring before something shifted. This past summer, her mother watched her pick up *The Hunger Games* and read it to her pet rabbit, then on a train - "the first time that's ever happened." Rather than leaving that struggle behind, Cora turned it into a podcast for the NPR Student Podcast Challenge, winning the national middle school prize from nearly 1,500 submissions, because she wanted younger kids to know that the confusion they feel has a name and a path forward. "I'm kind of just proud of myself that I overcame this hard, annoying thing," she says - a sentence that carries, in its plainness, everything worth knowing about what perseverance actually looks like from the inside.