"all that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream."
- edgar allen poe
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NICKNAMESXX Ollie, Ol
AGEXX 17
SEXUALITYXX asexual biromantic
YEARXX Junior
D.O.B.XX 27-07-19
HEXXX #7f99b1
HAIR COLORXX Blonde
EYE COLORXX Dark brown
Ollie's style is essentially layers upon layers. He's almost always cold, and that feeling has only just increased since the hallucinations started. Even in summer, he seems to wear a t-shirt and a hoodie. You know it's hot if Ollie wears just a t-shirt. In winter, he layers up with scarves and hats and often three or more layers. It's simplistic, often block colours or check prints. Flannels are one of his favourite items of clothing as he adores the feel of the fabric. He has two piercings in his left ear, an orbital and a helix. His dark blonde air can sometimes appear to be almost brown in certain lights, and requires little more styling than a little gel or wax in the mornings to make it a little less messy. He's taller than average and relatively slightly built, although there's more muscle on him than one would first imagine thanks to being forced into lacrosse from a relatively young age.
STRENGTHSXX
XXâ„ Fast : Ollie is light on his feet and builds up speed quickly. He's agile once he builds up momentum, easily dancing around those he wants to dodge.
XX℠Excellent memory : Before his brain started trying to fool him with déja vu and dissociation, Ollie was the type of person who could remember anyone's birthday having been told only once, who never had problems remembering anyone's name, and who could remember the smallest of facts about people. He still can, but finds he trusts those facts less and less.
WEAKNESSES
XX â„ Dependence : A desperate attempt to find something that made the overwhelming noise in his head go quiet has lead him to a cocktail of drugs. While they're all legitimate prescription drugs and he obtains them through legitimate means, Ollie is dependent on them as he fears that without them, things will only get worse.
XXâ„ Weak : Ollie might be fast, but he isn't terribly strong in his upper body. He'd struggle to carry anything heavier than a few full grocery bags, even over short distances. When it comes to anything that requires upper body strength, such as climbing, he finds it extremely difficult and if he is even able to do so, must do so slowly.
FEARSXX
XXâ„ Hallucinations : They've only been getting worse. He's afraid that they're going to swallow him whole, that they will just drive him mad or that all he will ever know is those strange sights and even stranger noises.
XXâ„ Enclosed spaces : Only made worse by the number of scans he's had to endure in the past year, Ollie had to be sedated quite heavily so they could get him in to an MRI scanner without him having a panic attack. He has no idea why they terrify him so much.
SECRETS
XX â„ Hallucinations: For the past year, Ollie's been having auditory and visual disturbances. It started with strange sounds, tones that were out of place, things that sounded almost like voices but not quite. And then it spread into his visual senses. It can feel as though there's a veil over the world or that things are rippling slightly. He struggles to describe them exactly, but they've earned him trips to a number of doctors. Once the first doctor assured his parents that a treatment would work, that was all they cared about. Even when it worsened and Ollie dislocated his arm and broke his nose after a vision hit in the middle of a lacrosse game, they didn't care. It was only Ollie himself going to see other specialists that got him on a rather unorthodox cocktail of drugs. They're not working as well as they used to, but they are still working, and the frequency has been reduced from several a day to maybe one every day or two. He's terrified that he's losing his mind.
PERSONALITYXXX You couldnât be blamed for thinking that Ollie is a happy kid. He always seems to be happy, be it joking with his teammates as they leave lacrosse training or cracking jokes with the other theatre techs, he seems to be full of life, full of energy. Heâs a caring person who always makes a point of remembering the important and the significant things about the people around him. He has a few close friends, but doesnât seem to be a part of any group, floating between them all, at once accepted by them and a part of none of them. Heâs always identified more with the theatre and orchestra kids compared to the jocks, but even heâs found his lacrosse teammates havenât been too bad. Theyâve stood up for him when other jocks slung slurs at him after he came out, and Ollie appreciates them.
But as much as he has people convinced that heâs fine, that thereâs absolutely nothing wrong with him, itâs a deep lie. Heâs just so good at playing into the lie that he sometimes forgets it isnât true. But Ollie has spent his entire life pretending to be somebody he isnât, and itâs breaking him. His parents want him to be the perfect son, the model child. They donât care that Ollie is the only person who can get the delicate and temperamental sound system in the college auditorium to work, they donât care that heâs been getting straight Aâs in English, they just question why he isnât better. When he announced he wants to study psychology and English at college, they began a torrent of disapproval, questioning how heâd ever get a job out of it. Ollie has been torn down by the people who should have built him up, and itâs had lasting effects.
The hallucinations and dissociation have only just made that worse. His parents see him as broken, treated him as though it was his fault that the medication they wanted him to be on made him feel as though he was constantly dreaming, stopped him from sleeping, and made him feel so nauseous he couldnât eat for hours afterwards. He feels as though he canât trust his own mind. He wouldnât admit it, but the episode at the lacrosse game scared him. His visual disturbances made him feel dizzy, made him slower to react, and meant that he didnât react in time to stop himself being forcefully shoved out of the way- accidentally, of course. But itâs made him terrified of being alone, and so heâs forcing on his happy demeanor more than ever so people wonât see the cracks and see that heâs so scared to be alone- or worse, find out why.
HISTORYXXX Ollie was born in Manchester, and spent the first seven years of his life there. His parents were extremely upper middle class and weren't afraid to show it. Ollie's father was the CFO of a large multinational, while his mother was a leading consultant in the pharmaceutical industry. Ollie still isn't entirely sure why they decided to move to the US, but at first, it seemed like a huge adventure. In reality, it was the beginning of his life being forced into whatever his parents wanted it to be.
He was involved in pretty much every extracurricular going in elementary and middle school. Every hour was occupied with something, it seemed. Some of them, Ollie loved. Some of them, he tolerated. Others, he hated. But he went because it kept his parents happy, and despite all of this, he was pretty happy too. There was the novelty of being the new kid, of people liking his accent, of people wanting to see his uncharacteristically large house. He was actually a pretty happy kid. But it all seemed to go wrong around puberty. It started when he began to realise he wasn't straight. While his parents were open-minded, he knew that they'd planned out a perfect life for him that always seemed to involve a wife, not a husband. It was the beginnings of realising that he didn't fit into the person they seemed to want him to be. They pushed him towards science, towards maths, towards something like that they did. But Ollie's true love was English. He scraped passing grades in maths and science, much to their disappointment.
As high school approached, Ollie managed to convince them to let him drop most of the extracurriculars he was doing to give him time to study. However, when he wanted to just keep up theatre and orchestra, they weren't... exactly pleased. A compromise was reached where he would keep on lacrosse as well. He enjoyed lacrosse, but the toxic masculinity of the jocks sometimes made him feel a little uneasy. But when he came out at the age of 16, he found his teammates to be some of the most supportive of everyone. His parents struggled at first, but quickly moved on once they realised that they could now start searching for eligible girls AND boys to try and set him up with.
It was shortly after coming out that the hallucinations started. At first, it was just strange sounds, tones that didn't belong, weird distortions that were there for half a second and gone again. He put it down to stress, but then the visual disturbances started about a month later. His loss of depth perception during an episode meant that his parents noticed when he slipped down three of the steps on one of the staircases and swore loudly in surprise. They took him to "the best doctor" who put Ollie in to scanner after scanner, and just resorted to sedating Ollie until he was practically unconscious in order to get him in to the MRI scanner. Ollie's brain showed no sign of trauma, or injury, or any abnormality. It was a perfectly healthy brain that was just acting strangely. So he was put on antipsychotics and referred to a psychiatrist. The antipsychotics didn't last, and neither did the psychiatrist who could tell that Ollie didn't meet any of the criteria for mental illness, other than mild depression and anxiety. Ollie's parents grew irate and blamed Ollie, saying he just was in denial. Even when Ollie's symptoms visibly deteriorated and he started having multiple attacks a day, they didn't care. Even after he broke his nose, dislocated his arm, and nearly got a concussion during a lacrosse game, they didn't care. Ollie went back to his psychiatrist, who referred him to a number of other doctors. His parents funded this reluctantly, but it was worth it. A delicate balance of a certain type of epilepsy medication and anti-anxiety medication brought the symptoms under control. But they've slowly been getting worse, even with the medication, and Ollie has no idea where it's going. More and more, he's feeling strong senses of déja vu, or feeling like his surroundings aren't real. He's starting to fear that there's something really, really wrong with him.