Kyleigh (12) Selected as December 2025 Friend Mail Recipient! 💝

jennifer2156
4 days ago
3 min read

Updated: 28 minutes ago

"Compassionate" girl with epilepsy bullied to tears, told "we're not friends with you anymore because you are different."

"Kind, selfless and compassionate" Kyleigh just turned 12 in November. Like so many 6th Graders, she loves making friendship bracelets and writing in her journals - filling up 15 at last count!! 📓📚 She is great at volleyball, and adores her two rescue dogs, Miracle and Blue. Her love for animals has her dreaming of becoming a veterinarian one day - she even helps takes care of her neighbors' dogs for free!

Kyleigh's generosity doesn’t stop with animals. She eagerly joins community shoe and food drives to support families in need. And in one moment her mom shared - a moment that says everything about who Kyleigh is - she quietly chose to skip her own lunch so she could give her lunch money to a new girl who had none. 💕

It's hard to imagine a better friend than this kind Texas girl - or that she has endured heartbreaking bullying since the 4th Grade - targeted for her medical condition: epilepsy.

The empathetic 6th Grader hopes to adopt kids that "have been abused and neglected" when she grows up. 🧡

“Nearly half of kids with rare diseases, cancer or chronic pain experience bullying, and any child with a chronic condition faces five times higher odds of being teased about their illness" according to the NIH. At the Be A Friend Project, we have amplified many heartbreaking stories to raise awareness of students who have been terrorized by classmates while dealing with serious and debilitating conditions.

Kyleigh has "absence seizures" that cause a short period of “blanking out” or staring into space - and she can have as many as 20 every day, including constantly throughout the school day.

Like other kinds of seizures, absence seizures are caused by brief abnormal electrical activity in the brain. They may come and go so quickly that no one notices anything wrong - or observers may mistake the symptoms for simple daydreaming or not paying attention. To manage her epilepsy, Kyleigh takes about 11 pills daily. As she grows, her medications need frequent adjustments, making her journey an ongoing one - but she continues to face it with remarkable strength, despite the added and unbearable bullying from classmates.

Kyleigh's mom shares that her daughter often breaks down and cries when she gets home from school, coming from the bus where kids tell her she can't sit with them - that she doesn't deserve to sit with them - because she "is different." They call her the "special kid" who "shouldn't be in their classes." Bullies cruelly laugh at and mimic her absence seizures, and have called her names to demean her appearance. When Kyleigh fractured her ankle this year, a boy kicked her leg out from her crutches to make her fall.

Kyleigh's mom shares her beautiful little girl with such a big heart is struggling to deal with the hurt. Her grades have suffered as a result of the bullying, causing her to take off a semester from the volleyball team she loves.