I’ve never actually written a blog before so I’m not sure how it all goes down but I’m going to give it a go so please bare with me…
I suppose i should start with some quick facts about myself so you can get to know me, My name is Brittany, I’m 19 and i was born and raised in Melbourne, Australia.
I live with my best mate and hero which is my stepdad (who i call dad) who has been there since i was pretty much born and my two younger sisters, they both send me absolutely crazy at times but then again they are a huge part of my life and if i had
the chance i probably wouldn’t swap them for the world.
My mum moved out about 5 years ago so i had the experience of a mum and dad home life until i was about 14, unfortunately i lost my biological father a year before that when i was 13 years old, I have 3 grandma’s and 3 grandpa’s who are all still with me and a dog Boofah I know I don’t have your average family tree but to me my family, no matter how wide it spreads or how many adopted family members i have it is one of the most important things in my life.
I like to pride myself on how much of a happy go lucky girl i am, i always like to look at things in the most positive way that i can, I’m your typical 19 year old girl, I like to party, I love to shop, spend time on my hair, I’m crazy about the sport of boxing and new shoes (sneakers and the occasional pair of heels are always a winner with me!)
Things haven’t always been that way though, on the 17/3/2014 4years ago now my life changed forever, i found myself waking up out of a coma around 8 weeks after that date fighting for my life and refusing to face the world with my new face.
I was 15 years old when i went from having not a scar on me to becoming what i sometimes see myself as which is a page in a Melways (Melbourne book of all the road maps).
For those of you who don’t know my story i was 15 when i pretty much “set myself on fire” to be honest i hate putting it that way i feel like it makes me sound like a suicidal maniac but at the end of the story each person has their own opinion and many people see it differently,
i know deep down what i feel so Im not going to try to explain myself to you all ill leave it up to you to make up your own mind on the situation. So it pretty much started when i was fourteen I began dating a twenty two year old,
it was my Dads’ worst nightmare but every teenage girls dream to have an older boyfriend especially with a cute little baby, you feel like you can be the one to step in and fix things,
So i began to rebel against my parents, by running away from home staying out weeks and days at a time till there were warrants out for my arrest because i had been missing for so long, i dropped out of school half way through year 9 so i only have a year 8 pass, I moved in with him and i dedicated my whole life to becoming what i thought was the “perfect girlfriend” i had somehow dedicated my whole life to him before i knew it, i didn’t speak to my own friends any more only really his, I didn’t have my own phone for a long time and he became what my whole world revolved around, I believed I was the happiest girl alive i thought i had it all, a boyfriend, independence, a stepchild, good looks and of course the dribbling and dribbling in drugs that i started to do with him only made things seem more of a thrill but of course all of that is a recipe for disaster, things went really well for the first year we hardly fought,
I won his family over the best i could and his son loved me but then things started to spiral, he started to hang back out with his mates and drink a lot and when he would drink he would become aggressive, not physically aggressive but verbally aggressive, back then i thought that was okay but now i see that no woman even deserves to be verbally abused by someone who is meant to love her especially for no reason.
He began fighting with me over nothing really and accusing me of cheating all the time even when he would be the one coming home all hours of the night with his friends, the more and longer he kept accusing me the more I started to think about it and him being the way he was didn’t make him to appealing,
I’m not making excuses what i did next was wrong but i am only 15 by this stage remember, I cheated on him with someone he knew, he ended up finding out the next day when he asked me i denied nothing, i told him the truth no matter how bad it was, after a few hours of him telling me off and making me feel guilty for what i had done he then tells me that when we first got together he had been with one of my best friends at the time and then it all made sense he had been accusing me all this time because the guilt had been eating at him and he needed me to do wrong to make what he did right.
After we both found out and got over the initial shock we tried to make another go of things but it wasn’t the same, he was always drinking and getting angry until one morning at round 11 am i decided to call him, he had been drinking with one of his friends again and was saying the usual horrible things to me but this time it was different this time i just wasn’t the strong woman that i usually am and i broke, i went outside to try find something to hurt myself with just to get attention, i remember looking at the brick wall thinking i can’t hit my head on that its to hard then i looked over and seen the red and yellow petrol container, i thought if i just pour it on myself while he can hear me he will realise I’ve had enough and i can’t take this anymore so thats what i did, i picked it up and poured petrol all over myself while asking him if he could hear me,
he said that the next call he wanted was for me to be dead and he hung up the phone. I didn’t set out to set myself on fire i have the balls to do many things but not that, i wasn’t in the mood to have a nice relaxing shower i was to stressed and before i knew it the petrol was dry and i was crying talking to my grandma in my bedroom with a lighter in my hands,
i turned the round circle on the lighter when it sparked, my life flashed before both mine and my grandmas’ eyes we both just looked at each other it was a delayed reaction but sure enough before i knew it my arm was on fire and within seconds i watched it travel to my whole upper body, i was running around my house frantic, my grandma was ringing emergency services and my pour younger sister Brielle was freaking out, i ran to the bathroom where i thought of jumping in the shower but i seen our plastic shower curtain and thought that will melt on me i can’t do that so i kept running around frantically,
something told me to go outside so i ran out my front door where my neighbour at the time seen me and ran over to try and put me out he was tapping and tapping me but it wasn’t helping at all, and it was too hot for his hands so he moved away and said he was sorry , for a split second i thought i was dead but then he yelled stop, drop and roll, i jumped into my garden bed, rolled once and the flames went out.
As i stood up police had arrived to the scene and got me to stand with them, within moments the ambulance and fire brigade had arrived and i was walked into the ambulance where they layed me down, put a jelly suit on me and put me to sleep. 8 weeks later i woke up and my family was saying happy easter which was crazy because I didn’t even realise how long i had been out. My first thought was definitely “wow i have F****D myself grand” and thats where i started to discover how painful it was to move well actually how painful it was to do everything, i had to learn to walk, talk and eat again, i had lost all muscle mass so i couldn’t even use my arms to do basic things like pick my nose, my whole upper body suffered 3rd degree burns to %60 and i lost the face that I had for 15 years. Rehabilitation was hard at the start i hated the physiotherapists i used to yell at them and almost try kick them to keep them away from me because when the touched me it hurt to much, I decided to pull my head in and stick with it because i knew i needed to come out even stronger and the silly exercises and all the gym work was what was miking me better and what was giving me movement back in my body, i spent all up 3 months in hospital and did about 6 months of rehab after i came home, when i came home i couldn’t even close a full fist and i used to tell all my specialists that it was dream to make a full fist again and that was before i discovered the sport of boxing which saved my life and got me to make fists again but thats another story.
I know a lot of you reading this probably have many thoughts but what i hope many of you are thinking is what i had to learn the hard way, That no matter what happens in your life or no matter what your story is there is always light at the end of the tunnel and noone should take their life over someone or something so silly, because 4 years on I’m kicking goals, i am proud to be who i am, i am embracing my new face and i wouldn’t change my life for the world because being here with my family and friends for a few more years means more to me now then it ever did before
