Post by ANDREA CONNOR on Jun 4, 2012 0:04:30 GMT -5
...Andrea Louise Connor*
*Never judge a person until you've walked a mile in their shoes.*
[/size]*Never judge a person until you've walked a mile in their shoes.*
...basics*
name Andrea Louise Connor
nickname Andi, Ani, or Dree occasionally, but she usually just goes by Andrea
age Fifteen
gender Female
grade Sophomore at Baum Academy
hometown Kansas City, Missouri
sexuality Straight
personification Nana from Peter Pan
status Dormant
face claim Olesya Rulin
...appearance*
hair color Brown with a tinge of blonde.
eye color A dark blue-green, which surprises most people after they learn about her condition.
build Very petite.
height 5'2"
clothing style Casual, but still trendy. Her mother likes to watch what the other kids at Baum are wearing and pick out similar things for her.
distinctive traits Her size and constantly moving hands.
...personal*
personality
People often do not realize that Andrea is blind upon first sight, because her eyes look and act normally because of the specific type of blindness she has. It's only until people realize that she never quite looks people exactly in the eye when she talks (although she tries very hard) or when they try pointing at things that they figure it out. However, she likes when people don't notice. She doesn't want people to see her as 'the blind girl', and hates to feel like a charity case. She always wants to do everything herself, never wants help from anyone concerning her disabilities. When they try to be overly helpful, she may voice her discontent slightly but never enough, she would never want to upset anyone. When Andrea's vision went, the first sense that grew stronger was her sense of touch. She suddenly loved to feel the textures of things, and used her sense of touch to try to visualize the world around her. Even when she was just sitting down, her hands were always subtlety moving, trying to analyze her environment.
Andrea is an insane people pleaser, and gets upset whenever people don't like her or her friends are angry at her. When they do occasionally get angry at her, or even if she thinks they're angry at her, she spends all her time trying to reverse the damage. Her desire to please people has also led to her extreme politeness, she says 'please' and 'thank you' to any sort of thing anyone ever does for her. She's very loyal and overly protective of her friends, always defending them and backing their opinions no matter what they are. Despite that, she is very insecure, and always feels like people are judging her; her biggest fear is that all of her friends secretly hate her. Her fear of people judging her led her to always think before she said anything, not wanting to say the wrong thing and offend someone.
Andrea was always very shy as a child, and her quietness only increased when she went blind. She hides her disability from people as long as she can, even though it was usually painfully obvious when she carried around her white cane in crowds or around the city. Although very quiet to strangers, her friends knew her as very sweet and caring, always putting others above herself, and never saying anything negative about anyone.
Although she is a very quiet person, her brain is always running a thousand miles a minute. She is very frustrated all the time, and is very hard on herself when she doesn't do something as well as she would expect. As composed as she is in public, she completely falls apart when she's alone, studying letters and shapes for hours, and hating herself when she doesn't learn them fast enough, or when she's in a class and doesn't process the information as well as the other kids, or when she can sense that somebody is looking at her with pity. All she wanted was to be a normal teenager, and it pained her to know that she could never achieve that reality.
past
Andrea Louise Connor was born on June 15th, 1997 in Kansas City, Missouri. Her birth had been 'a pleasant surprise', as her parents liked to put it, because she was born eleven years after her brother. Her parents both worked at a nearby high school, her father teaching American History and her mother teaching French. The summer Andrea turned nine, her parents both got offered jobs at Baum Academy, and they moved to New York City right before the start of the new school year. Andrea spent the rest of her childhood at Baum, doing homework in the empty classrooms at night while her parents were grading papers and playing hide-and-seek with her imaginary friend in the courtyard.
On July 23rd, 2010, Andrea was walking across a busy intersection when she was hit head-on by a car. The doctors said because of her small size, it was lucky that she was even alive, and that she had managed to escape with just a concussion and a few broken ribs. However, in the following days after the accident, Andrea's vision worsened, and in a few days she couldn't see anything. Her doctors thought it was a side affect from the medicine and that it would wear off. When it didn't, she was given an eye exam, which showed her eyes seemed to be functioning normally. After a few weeks of testing, it was soon discovered that she had head trauma to her Occipital Lobe, and was diagnosed with a form of blindness called Cortical Blindness, which means that there was nothing wrong with her actual eyes, but actually a part of her brain.
Her doctor told her that it was crucial that she leave all visual imagery behind and rebuild her new reality using only hearing and touch. But Andrea refused to accept the advice. Instead, she actually went in the exact opposite direction. She had a passionate desire to hold on to light and sight, to maintain, if only in memory and imagination, a vivid and living visual world. She would practice writing math problems over and over again, just so she wouldn't forget the shapes of the numbers. She still took notes in class, even though she also recorded her classes and the notes would be of no use for her.
Her father didn't take well to the news. He didn't want her going back to high school, he thought she should go to a special school for the blind, but Andrea insisted on staying at Baum. She didn't care if she didn't technically belong at Baum, it had been her home forever, and she wasn't going to leave everything she had ever known behind just because somebody said she couldn't do it.
present
Andrea still struggles with her blindness and fear of being judged, as they always seemed to play off of one another. Because as much as people try to deny it, people do treat the disabled differently. Andrea could always notice some hesitation in their voice, or extra suggestions for help because they don't know how to handle the situation properly, and although it originally annoyed her immensely, she's mostly gotten used to it. When it happened, she would just study harder when she got home, or stay late after school at Baum showing her father how well she knew the campus, anything to get her some reinforcement that she was becoming more normal.
She refuses to carry around a white cane around Baum, insisting that she has the place memorized anyways. She didn't, but the truth was that she doesn't want to be considered any lower than her peers. She's okay at traveling around, and has gotten permission to leave class a few minutes early so she wouldn't hit the rush of students on the way to her next class. Even so, her friends guide her around school, making sure they don't get separated in crowded hallways and grabbing her by the shoulder when she's about to walk into something.
She has been getting hallucinations occasionally, usually when she's just relaxing or doing something where she's not really paying attention. They lasted anywhere from a few minutes to several hours, and varied greatly. Mostly all she could see were lines, or random colors, but a few times she saw entire scenes. She never told anybody about the hallucinations, because she knew her father would think she was crazy. She knew it was normal to experience hallucinations at the stage in her blindness, but she also knew that they were only supposed to last the first twelve to eighteen months. The idea of losing her hallucinations was horrifying to her, because they were the last pieces of her vision that she had left.
family
David Vincent Connor (father), age 50
Carolyn Matilda Connor (mother), age 47
Samuel James Connor (brother), age 26
likes
-compliments
-things that have interesting textures
-inspirational quotes
-hallucinating
-books on tape
dislikes
-people who are awkward around her
-politics
-crowded places
-running into things
-rap music
other notes yeahhh no flow in this app, how about we just ignore that.
...literature*
book title Peter Pan
backstory So basically, Nana is the nurse for the Darling Children and is very good at her job, although she is a dog. It is said that Nana "does not speak or do anything beyond the physical capabilities of a large dog, but acts with apparent understanding of her responsibilities."
...roleplayer*
name Noa
age ro-ro-rotate
gender your
rp experience owl
how you found ouac for
rp sample SCIENCE
