Johnny Quinn was only four years-old when family’s dog knocked over a candle in the back garden shed he was playing in, causing a fire that led to 95% of his body being covered in burns. Now 18, Johnny has overcome many obstacles stemming from this tragedy, and he has finally learned to love himself.

Johnny was only rescued from the fire when his 23-year-old sister Leah, who was babysitting him at the time, managed to pull him out. Since the fire, he has more than 80 reconstructive surgeries and even battled anorexia as he struggled to accept the way he looked.

Now, however, Johnny has finally learned to embrace himself.

“Instead of looking in the mirror every day and seeing something I hated, I started seeing what I could enhance and what I could accept,” he said. “When you’re a burn survivor, you’re just surviving but I like to call myself a ‘burn thriver’ now because I’m actually thriving with my burns.”

“So many people stare at me, every single day, every time I’m in public. That used to really get to me,” Johnny said. “After my accident, it was so much worse even than the physical burns that I had been through. Now I try to look at everything with a different perspective.”

Johnny began to really hate the way he looked when he became a teenager, and he soon developed anorexia.

“I felt that I was genuinely a monster and I shouldn’t have friends, because everyone was scared of me and I didn’t deserve them,” he said. “I kept all this turmoil inside of me for so long, it turned into anorexia. Where I didn’t even want to take care of my body anymore, where I just stopped eating. I never realized how selfish I was acting, obviously I had a family that cared about me but I never realized it.”

Now, Johnny wants to help inspire other burn victims to love themselves as well!

“A lot of people call [us] a burn victim and I was totally a burn victim too, somebody who let their situation have control over their life,” he said. “I want to be the person who changes people’s minds, that they can be comfortable in their own skin if I can be.”