CLAIMED. EVANS, EMMELINE

female

Straight

nineteen

january 16, 1993

american with Belgium ancestors

English
Semi-fluent in spanish

Emmie

0.55

Claimed

Air

n/a

9/15/13 by Jess

crayola

ronni trippett

yes i guess

Christa Renz from Attack on Titan

Emmeline and her family have always lived in California, though they've moved from city to city over the years, going wherever her family could find work. Often they moved just a city away when one of her parents got a promotion or transferred to a different office. Her mother worked a lot out of home selling Pampered Chef, Avon, Party Lite, and other such sales such as that. Of course, that meant they usually had to change schools, too. 

Currently, Emmeline and her family are taking residence in an upper-middle class neighborhood in Los Angeles. She graduated high school with her online classes but never walked with her actual class, and is not currently looking into any colleges. She has no job and lives with her parents and younger brother. It's a decent house, with three bedrooms, two baths, a study, a living room, separated kitch and dining room, and even has it's own porch. 

» Five feet six inches
» One hundred pounds
» Blue eyes
» Shoulder-length blonde hair
» Very pale

Emmie doesn't get out much any more. In fact, she doesn't do a whole lot of anything anymore. She gets out every now and then when dragged out by family, but that's it. It's taken a toll on her health. Her skin used to be a healthy color, but a couple years without sun has made it pale as a sheet and bad care has left it blotchy. She's become almost skin and bones and is very weak physically. Emmie is very out of shape and hardly eats. Her therapist and doctor have tried to get to do more exercise and get her on a calorie-heavy diet to get her weight up, but she's not very strict on keeping up with it, and her parents often let her get away with being lazy.

Due to her mental disorder, Emmeline can't even recognize herself in the mirror. It's something she's gotten used to, but in order to remedy it and remind herself that she's different from everyone else, she tries to compensate a lot by tossing a bunch of make-up on. It doesn't even matter if she's going out or not, she likes to put on some eye-liner and mascara, a little bit of foundation. . . she sometimes does her eyeliner up in little artsy styles just to compensate for a) not recognizing herself in the mirror and b) because she thinks it hides her ugly mug.

She's all around a girly-girl, so she wears skirts, dresses, loose shirts, lots of accessories, heels, and other such things. She really likes to pile on the accessories and hair pieces, using them to somehow compensate for something—her lack of social skills, the appearance she has little faith in. She doesn't have a lot of self-confidence to begin with, and they make her feel better. That's the kind of stuff she's supposed to wear anyway, right? To be accepted? She thinks all of that stuff will make people think she's pretty. Though her hair is short currently, she's working on growing it out.

Ever since her accident, Emmie has been terrified of other people—well, not entirely terrified of them as she's terrified of the way they think of her and how interacting with them is going to go. She believes that there is no way anyone could like her, that she'll never have friends again and that it's better that she just stays out of everyone's way. Even before the accident this way of thinking was pretty prevalent, but dimmed down. It was the reason she was (and still is) highly prone to peer pressure and being a doormat. She'll do anything to make sure someone doesn't get disappointed with her, to make people like her.

Emmie has developed a terrible sense of self-worth ever since she lost the ability to recognize people. Her self-esteem has plummeted since her accident and she thinks herself the lowest of the low. Her own self image brings her to tears almost every night. She's certain her family hates her and thinks the worst of her, and she spends a lot of time in her room on the computer, avoiding any kind of interaction with anyone. Her parents only encourage this kind of behavior by opting not to bother her and failing to remind her to keep to her regime. 

Before her accident, Emmie enjoyed movies and television, but after it she couldn't keep up. She couldn't tell the characters apart and it was making it difficult for her to follow the plot through the whole show. Cartoons were alright, if her father caught her, she'd be lectured about watching something made for children, so she avoids watching them around him and does it only when she's sure he's not home. Along with cartoons, she developed a taste for books as an alternate. Video games were also decent because the artwork was easy to differentiate unless it was hyper realistic, and most of the time she didn't need to follow the plot.

Emmie can often be caught talking to herself, but it sometimes goes beyond that. When she is muttering to herself, it's usually an entire conversation she's having with another person, even if they're not there. She tends to imagine what kinds of things someone would be saying to her and carries an entire conversation all by herself—imagining she were a braver girl. If caught she immediately stops, but if she doesn't know you're watching, you might catch her in the act, or hear her behind a door. Often times she's just berated herself, and sometimes she's just singing to herself. 

Thanks to excessive use of the internet, Emmie tends to talk in internet slang a lot, and references various memes and other internet paraphanelia. She uses the media to dictate most of her conversations, thinking that if she's kept up to date with the latest internet fads then she'll have a little easier time talking to people, but she even has a hard time making friends on the internet so she just spends her time alone, not really talking to many people. It takes a lot of doing to make her open up, but if she really thinks you like her, she can be way more talkative and acts like a normal person, but the second she thinks otherwise, she clams up. 

Despite all of her mental and physical hurdles, Emmeline is a sweet girl. She hardly ever speaks badly about a person (except maybe to her stuffed animals) and is always polite and courteous to everyone. Sometimes it goes a little too far and she can be a doormat, but she's working on that. Hidden underneath layers of self-doubt lies a tiny sheet of stick-to-itiveness. But above all, she really tries her hardest to be a good friend and a good person. She may not know what she wants to do with her life yet, but she's taking it at baby steps; working on her own problems, getting herself back to an acceptable social and mental level, then she'll figure out her life's purpose.

Being on the internet has taught her a lot, though most of it she's never really put into practice, so it's actually a little unknown if she'd even be able to do most of it. For instance, Emmeline understands the concept behind picking a lock. Given the right tools, she might be able to pull it off. Emmeline also knows several different "life hacks" to make life easier, such as elevator tips, internet tips, and just life tips. She especially follows one she read that said "always go out in public dressed like you're about to meet the love of your life." Of course, some of the things learned on the internet are questionable, but in theory she knows how to do a lot of things that would never really come up on a day-to-day basis. What she doesn't know, she can easily find on the internet. 

Emmeline has been to several therapists and councelors since her accident, and a lot of different disorders have been thrown out at her, but the most prominent and easist to diagnose was the prosopagnosia. It is a disorder greatly effecting her ability to recognize people via their facial features. Though it is common for people not to remember faces, she no longer has the ability at all. Her friends, her family, and even her own refelction are foreign to her. Spotting any familiar face in a crowd is impossible. It is the main cause for the majority of her problems socially and mentally. 

Though it had been fairly controlled and at normal levels, her social anxiety since developing prosopagnosia have reached drastic levels, enough for her more recent therapist to begin treating her for the actual Social Anxiety Disorder. Some people only get anxious when facing public speaking, but Emmeline fears most social situations. She often finds herself making up people's opinions of her for them, imagining the worst possible outcome of interactions, and always thinks people find the worse in her. Emmeline will fret and panic over situations that haven't even happened yet. It's kept her locked up in her room many times. 

Clinical depression has also been thrown around, especially after her suicide attempt. She's shown several of the symptoms--her lack of an appetite, the fact that she has no interest in anything she used to, she is often fidgety and prone to pacing, and several others. The most prominent is her constant feeling of guilt and her terrible habit of blaming everything that goes wrong on herself. Emmeline sees herself as nothing but a failure, that she no longer deserves to have a life. Often times she can be found crying alone, sometimes for no reason, and she sleeps a lot more than she should.

The main treatment that Emmeline is recieving for all of these symptoms is psychological counceling. There is no real medical treatment for face blindness, especially since research into it is not as extensive and it is a relatively new disorder, so she's mainly being taught how to cope with it. Instead of fighting it, her therapist is helping her come up with ways to work with it. So far Emmeline has been trying to make it a habit to memorize other features of those she gets to know—the way they walk, the way they stand, their body type, hair color, hair style, a tattoo, a scar; anything that could possibly help her recognize people. Once she gets that down, a lot of her stress and anxiety should also alleviate. 

For her depression and social anxiety disorder, she is taking some medications to help with the symptoms. She's tried a couple different antidepressants to help with both disorders, and on top of that she has a a prescription for an effective beta-blocker that helps out with the physical symptoms of Social Anxiety Disorder. They keep her from shaking and help keep her heart rate normal. The antidepressants she takes once a day at the same time every day, much like a birth control pill (which she is also on to keep hormones from making things worse), but the beta-blockers she takes whenever she feels a panic-attack start coming on. 

On top of the medication and therapy to cope with prosopagnosia, Emmeline has another therapist to help out with her social anxiety disorder and depression. They are currently trying cognitive-behavior therapy to kind of reprogram the way she thinks about certain things. Her therapist works with her and supports her during certain reinactments of social situations, where her therapist tries to coach her in how to think about the situation and how to retrain her on how to act during them. Part of the therapy is making sure her parents take her outside as much as possible. To make sure she eats right and exercises, as a healthy body is another step toward a healthy mind. 

Once upon a time, Emmie was susceptible to peer pressure. She often fell into the wrong crowds at her school, though it wasn't always the case. More often than not she managed to find a good group of friends, but it was hard when they ended up moving to keep her friends consistent. Despite her parents trying their hardest to bring her up with morals and raise her to be a proper good girl, she still cared a great deal what other people thought of her and did whatever she could to be "popular." She wasn't by any means a delinquent, but she didn't exactly do things that her parents would approve of.

When she was fourteen, some of her friends from school had fallen into a larger, older crowd. Something about them liking "older men." In order to impress them, a small subset of her main group of friends attended a party and convinced her to come with them, using the old "anyone who's anyone will be there! And you're not a nobody, right?" She told her mom and dad after being prodded so much that she was going to work on a school project and one of the boys drove her and her friends to the party. There was alcohol involved, and Emmie had just a bit too much to drink.

One trip to the hospital later, she was put into intensive care along with one of her other friends. Her friend made it out with some minor problems, but Emmie drew the short end of the stick. All of that pressure at the party made her drink enough to cause her some brain damage. The severity of the damage was first discovered when her parents came into the room and she didn't recognize them. The doctor at first told them it was just some form of amnesia from the trauma and that she would get over it in time, but it lasted. And lasted. And lasted. The real diagnosis was presented after further testing. Soon they realized it was faces, not identities, that she wasn't recognizing.

Prosopagnosia (or "Face Blindness") was what they called it. Some people have a hard time remembering faces. After the incident at the party, Emmie could not, no matter how long she'd known a person or how often she was together with them, recognize a person's face. It could be her mother, her best friend, or some stranger on the street. There is no way she could tell just by trying to recognize their face. Her mother took the news even harder than Emmeline did, as Emmeline didn't quite understand the severity of her case. Thankfully the trauma wasn't magnified by law enforcement: since it was her first offense, all she got was a fine her parents paid and she was forced to participate in an alcohol education class.

After her recovery she tried going to school, but it proved to be an overwhelming experience. None of the faces at school were familiar to her. She didn't know if she was walking into the right class, hanging out with the right group of people, and she couldn't take the whispers and the rumors about what had happened that night at the party. The whispers, the looks people gave her, the way the teachers started to treat her, it was just too much for her young brain. Emmeline wound up having a panic attack in the girl's bathroom for most of the day until it was time to go home, and even then it wasn't until twenty minutes after school ended that Emmeline dragged herself to her mom's car.

She refused to go to school after a few weeks, and with some hesitation, her parents enrolled her in an online school. At first she'd just been making up excuses, but when she ran out of excuses, she just flat out refused. However, the online school seemed to take the edge off of the recovery process, but things just got worse. Emmeline still tried to go out, but it was still overwhelming. People she knew kept asking her "do you know who I am?" She couldn't take the disappointed looks and started to refuse the outings with her parents. She even refused to go see her own grandparents.

Finally, after about a month, Emmie refused to go outside at all. She spent the next two years locked up in her room on her computer, going outside only when it was extremely necessary. Even locked up in her room she didn't want to talk to anyone. She stalked facebook sometimes, but hardly ever interacted with other people. When she played video games, she played solo and immediately quit if someone else tried to come into the game, or turned off the multi-player settings completely. Incapable of handling the stress of being social, she completely shut herself off to the world.

Her parents attempted to send her to therapy, to help her cope. On top of the prosopagnosia, her therapist diagnosed her with Social Anxiety Disorder, probably an onset from the face-blindness and how she was handling it. The therapist told her parents that the best thing was just to get her out there and doing things with people and she might get over it with added therapy, but her parents couldn't bring themselves to make her suffer like that, especially when she made such a fit that always ended with tears and begging, so they ended up faltering and letting her sit in her room. Her father was better about it, but her mom coddled her.

Eventually Emmeline couldn't take it anymore. The life she knew was over in her eyes. No one could ever possibly like her, she would never get a job, and she would always be a disappointment to her family. Her mind fabricated terrible things her family thought of her, and it was too much. Her brother was the only one who treated her normally. One night her depression reached a peak and she went so far as to write a note to her family, and made up her mind to end it. She wrote that she was sorry she was such a screw up. Sorry that she couldn't be the daughter they deserved. She left it in a place she figured her parents or her brother would find it and locked herself in the bathroom.

However, her brother got home early that night. Emmie's parents were going to be out a little longer on a rare date-night they wanted to take advantage of, but her younger brother wasn't. His hockey practice ended early and a friend dropped him off at home. He found the note immediately and ran through the house, demanding she answer him. He'd called emergency services as soon as he'd finished the note and left the phone on the counter as he scoured the house. Eventually he came upon the bathroom. He rammed against the door until it popped open and pulled a half-dead Emmeline into his arms.

She spent the next week in the hospital yet again until she was finally released at a therapist's recommendation. Her family was distraught and the therapist even wanted to talk to her brother a little bit about had happened, to ease his trauma. She was prescribed anti-depressants and was forced to go to therapy for the next year or until she was no longer a threat to herself. After the year ended, she would get an evaluation to determine if she needed more. The whole experience woke up a small part in Emmeline. She wasn't going to get out the easy way, and she had just caused her family more problems, so she decided to try her hardest to get better, even if it would be hard.