Where to from here – Skin deep

Transcript

As a whole lot of stuff that I want to do and only a finite amount of time that I had to do it.

Basically, I'm a teenager and teenagers don't usually have plans and I don't.

I'm very interested in becoming a professor specialising in burns scarring because I know what the kids are going through.

Like most people, I'm not super duper sure what I wanna do, you know, I'm trying to figure out what I, what I wanna do at uni and stuff like that.

I'm studying at the moment to be a teacher, so I really do enjoy history. So that's something that I wanna do. But I also really wanna be a politician. I'm not even aiming long, PM I'm talking here. Like I would love to be the Prime Minister.

Thinking about living for a month or so direct, like right after school in France, because I learned French and I really want to, you know, see if I can actually speak it properly.

I don't know who I'm gonna travel with. Probably my little sister cause she's my best friend.

I do wanna do some form of travel, but what, I have no idea. It's basically a lot of question marks along with, yes, I wanna do this, but how or when or why, is no idea.

There are a couple of times when I thought, I'm not gonna be able to do this, or I'm not gonna be able to do that. Once they've healed, you can just, it's just skin. You can do anything anyone else can do.

It didn't hold me back playing football, didn't hold me back at school, hasn't held me back through anything else. I just did it.

Doing things with groups, extracurricular activities is fantastic because you're with other people. They're generally positive, they're building you up and it just sort of helps to just take away that feeling of hopelessness.

There are times where it was like, I don't like this, I don't like having these scars, but it's kind of shaped who I am in a way. Like, without it happening, I probably wouldn't be as empathetic today as I am.

Just keep going. Just keep going. It's one of the main messages I would take out of it. You just gotta keep pushing through it. It's gonna be hard. It's gonna be tough. Thomas Edison failed a hundred times and if you asked him about it, he said, I didn't fail. I just found out. A hundred ways to not make a light bulb. And that's how you gotta look at it.

I suppose. You'll see things differently to what you did before. You'll see it through different lens. You'll see people differently. You know the thing, the little things that you see and the little memories and everything. You sort of get more grateful, I suppose.

Wouldn't change it. Easy for me to say, now I'm almost finished. But tell you what, like, it's, you know, you don't think that you'd ever go back to this normal state, but it, it really does. Like people, if anything, look at you in a different, more respectable light. Like you've just, you know, you're a, you're a survivor, you're a warrior, you're a fighter.

I don't really even think about them anymore over time. They've just kind of, you know, they don't, they're not a concern really anymore. I don't feel super self-conscious and you've just gotta go out and live because you can't let them stop you from doing anything you wanna do.

Look at the positives, because there's always a positive and there's always lessons to take out of, of every life experience.

Even though this sounds silly and I would've hated myself for saying this, it will get better. Like you're annoyed at yourself and anyone who says that to you, you're not gonna believe them. It will take forever, but it will, and you'll feel better eventually. And when I say forever, it's not literally going to be forever, but, slowly you will get better.

You have those times where you're like, I can't do it. I can't do it like going through school thinking, I can't pass this subject. But then you think, well, look what you've been through. You thought you couldn't go through all that pain. You thought it was over, but you did. You got through it. You just have to keep thinking positive.