Hi I'm Lexi. I am 17 years old and will be graduating from high school in a few weeks. My whole life I have always been a bigger girl, and I felt that this set me apart. It also didn't help throughout my schooling career I was tormented about my weight. Several times people told me that I was fat, that i looked like a cow, that no one could ever love me, that I was ugly, and that I needed to stop eating. These words took a toll on me and my self esteem hasn't fully recovered. But I am not here to tell you my story. My story is nothing compared to the one of my little brother Travis.

Travis is 14 years old and is in 8th grade. When he was two years old he was diagnosed with autism and went through many years of therapy that helped him through his disorder. He is highly functionally and seems normal but he still struggles with the social awkwardness and the sensory issues that most autistic kids experience. He has struggled making friends ever since 2nd grade when other kids started to notice his issues. People called him a freak and he was excluded by everyone. He also started gaining weight during this time because he used eating to cope with the pain of being isolated. The bullying only progressed as he got in to middle school. Kids would call him fat, tell him he needed a bra for his "man boobs", they would grab his chest and tell him he had the biggest boobs in the whole school. These were and still are everyday occurrences for him and the school has done little to nothing to stop/prevent this from happening to him. It's gotten so bad that he doesn't even want to go to school anymore and wants to drop out to be home-schooled for high school. He's started to believe he is worthless and its very depressed. I am worried that soon he might kill himself because he just won't be able to take it anymore.

I want my brother and other kids like my brother to never have to deal with this again. That's why I'm taking a stand.