More than Words: Bryn's Story

Bryn is 14 and lives near Warwick. He loves movies, especially Marvel ‘I love everything to do with it’, and video games and says ‘I go through phases - at the moment I’m enjoying role playing app games called Raid Shadow Legends.’ He also says he’s a history and drama boy at school and ‘I play comedic roles to perfection, I make everyone laugh.’ 

We asked Bryn to think about three quotes or sayings that resonate with him and talked to him about why.

I was in year 7 and having a rough time - in a big senior boy’s school it isn’t always easy and  I had my fair share of feeling unaccepted because I was ‘different’ because of my epilepsy and generally I am a bit of a nerd! Some boys were using my epilepsy against me saying it was a disease and you could catch it even though this isn’t true. I have idiopathic generalised epilepsy but they don’t know what caused it. So my mum found this poem online to help my mental state. It’s lots of poems combined together and is on my pin board above my desk in my room so I can see it whenever. I’ve had it printed out for three years now and I look at it when I have a bad time, though each year it gets easier. I always read the last four lines.  ‘I seek higher things’ is my school motto and if I go to college or university this will become a key part of it - it will always be in my mental psyche.

I’m a massive Marvel fan and Iron Man feels part of me. It’s his growth between his three solo movies. In the first he’s an egoist and knows what he wants to do which is how I felt in year 5 and 6 - I wouldn’t say I was an egoist but I was sure of myself. In the second movie he starts to question himself, which is what happened to me in year 7 after my epilepsy diagnosis - for some time after I didn’t know who I was and had no idea what epilepsy was and I had a hard time defining myself. Then he finally reaches a point in the third movie where he’s reaching out to others and trying to help them understand like how I am in year 9. It’s uniquely fitted my learning curve and it’s also a really touching and sad scene but good too - three simple words but they tie up all the films together with good winning over evil.

This song was literally playing when I had my second seizure. I had my first that morning, came home from hospital and was about to go to bed when I asked my mum to come and sit with me because I was worried. We played a few songs and it was halfway through the album when I had the seizure and stopped breathing. The reason why it’s stuck with us is because it referenced the moment so well. The fact that the particular song was playing at that particular time referenced by mum literally catching me when I fell. I don’t listen to it much anymore as I haven’t had a seizure for three years because I’m on medication. But I’m reducing my amounts so might listen to it more and we do belt it out when I’m having a bad day.