EARLY LIFE

Tom began his life on a rocky start. Born an albino baby with physical abnormalities such as severe eczema covering his body and asthma, his special needs proved to be a challenge for a preoccupied father and a neurotic mother. Though he persisted to be a mentally active and curious boy, his mother, a well meaning but overbearing woman named Linda, doted over and policed every moment of his day, which arrested his needs for solitude and independent exploration. Under the guise of complete safety, she created a stifled and controlled environment, insisting he stay indoors and guarded against all potential home hazards, both real and imagined. He was often alienated from his more adventurous older brother, Melvin, and out of his feelings of loneliness, he grew content to hurl himself in his education—finding it necessary to conceal his abstract thoughts and interests, in the form of cyptic poetry, from his mother's highly dogmatic sensibilities.

Tom's teenage years are where he actualized his passion for self-exploration and Journalism. In order to spend less time at home, Tom elected to stay after school to participate in volunteer activities for college credit as well as enrolled in an after-school program to pursue his writing. He became close with his Creative Writing teacher, who favored him and made him a member of staff for the school's bi-weekly paper, where he focused on highlighting the contributions of the Charity Club. His greatest achievement in those four years came during his senior year, where he was appointed Lead Editor of his Senior yearbook. Still an intensely shy boy, Tom would also try his hand at school weightlifting for a semester in order to overcome his anxiety and acquire some confidence, but his eczema and asthma together made such rigorous fitness too difficult. Humiliated and defeated, he put his full concentration back on academia.

YOUNG ADULTHOOD, UNIVERSITY

When the time came, Tom wasted no time applying for college. He was considered for 3 out of 4 of his applications, and he decided on a top University in Washington. Overjoyed to start his life away from home (the freedom to smoke like a chimney, despite having asthma, against his mother's vehement wishes!), his father lent him money to supplement his scholarship and the savings Tom had been accumulating working minimum wage. He moved out in the summer, and moved into an off-campus site which housed several other low-income students. He took to the alma mater culture with great zeal and absorbed himself in the many opportunities available to him. Eventually, after receiving his Bachelor of Journalism, he found better work as Editor for an online site, enabling him to work less hours from home in order to make his Master's degree a reality.

In was in that Master program that a confident career woman named Madeline had caught his eye. The two shared a night class together in an intimate little classroom, and she became the example of self-sufficience and composed elegance that he had loved in women, especially the women he could not have. Not content to just admire her, Tom took up Tennis in the mid afternoons to inspire his sexual confidence, stamina and physique, as well as to keep himself alert in the long, tired interims between school and work. Despite moving his seat closer and attempting to make polite conversation with her, Madeline remained unavailable to Tom for the remainder of the semester, keen to make her aloof desirability known to him.

Patient and persistent, Tom decided to wait on her after she agreed to have dinner with him one evening, and his complete abjection in her presence began to stand out to her. He became accustomed to buying her tokens of his affection during every outing, and her allowance of the exchange became a very comfortable symbol of security for them both. Almost immediately, Tom began to save up for a wedding ring, and proposed it to her just six months after she agreed to first start seeing him. She agreed to this, too, and the two were on cloud nine through her graduation day as a Master of Business Administration, and to their wedding a year later.

MARRIAGE AND PARENTING

Shortly after their marriage, The two found their roles in the home when Madeline bore their only son, Oliver, and Tom found himself a modest at-home job submitting articles to various online publishers to allow him to care for the infant full time while continuing his Master's (eventually graduating in Comm Mgmt. 2 years later), and so she could make a full return to work after her maternity period. Oliver expressed more attachment to his father as he grew up, so a wounded Madeline eventually began to take a more active role in her son's life, instructing Tom to feed him more books on business and finance so that he would grow more comfortable with the idea of inheriting her professional legacy. Showing no interest in her work at such a young age, it became a point of argument that Tom was not doing enough to inspire the boy in her absence, and that she would find more time for him both at her job (via take your child to work opportunities) and away from her job to bond with him ideally. Unhappy with the stress that this change was putting on him, Tom began to stand up for his son and the freedom he so wanted for him, and with Oliver taking his side on the matter, an unresolved, inner conflict between the two parents began to take seed. She would meet their resistance at times with an authoritativeness that bordered irrational, and Tom backed down in order to restore harmony to the family, but not without both anxiety and deep resentment for his wife.

Over a period of months, Tom witnessed Oliver fall into compliant apathy and withdrawal, and he realized that his son was quietly resenting his parents, Tom in particular for giving up on fighting for him. Unable to witness it any longer, he insisted on family counseling to Madeline for the good of the boy, who scoffed at his suggestion that the problem could lie anywhere other than with Tom's need to exercise control over him. Incensed by the irony, it finally occurred to Tom that he had ideologically married his mother. Tom began to quarrel with her again over a period of months in a long, cathartic spell of bitterly sarcastic criticisms of her that had been resurrected after going buried and unsaid for years. It wasn't until Madeline presented him with a divorce that Tom, lost and broken-hearted all at once at the thought of losing her, realized that he had also lost sight of the goal. His need for independence inspired as much control over his son as Madeline had, and he felt a harrowing doubt whether Oliver would have ever benefitted in his defense of him.

Tom begged her to renegotiate with him, but a firm though not unsentimental Madeline finally insisted that it was for the best. The divorce proceeded over many agonizing months, and the two would find their counseling in the form of a court attorney, who would decide on a strict, paper-bound plan for joint physical and legal custody of their son. It took the drastic measure of divorce to bring about a newfound formal respect between the three of them that cost them all of their intimacy, no loss more tragic to Tom than the loss of intimacy that he had had with Oliver. Left broken and spiritually bankrupt, Tom spent his first nights alone in his new apartment drowning his sorrows to sleep in liquor, a spell that took him two months to get out of. Only his weekly visits with Oliver would help to pull him out of his hole of cyclical despair.

REBUILDING, CAREER AND FUTURE

Tom puts his primary focus on recovering closeness with his son every chance he gets, though a despondent Oliver prefers to spend his time locked away in his room to marathon in online game competitions. Resolving to be the parent to generally leave him to his comforts, Tom only resolved to make the decision to take the both of them to post-divorce therapy sessions every other week. It was there that he learned about Oliver's failing grades and Madeline's new boyfriend. Tom's heart bleeds for his son, though it will still be a while before he can get through to him—before the ravages of change will settle into acceptance for the both of them.

In order to distract himself from the pain, Tom dives headfirst into the prospect of furthering his career just as he had years before, an ambition long since neglected. He arranges a portfolio of his previous work and, with the help of his alumni association, he eventually finds his muse as an Investigative Reporter for a local news outlet. He eagerly pours himself into his passion work, resolving to use all of his wits to find his rightful place in both his career and life, perhaps for the very first time.

TRIVIA FACTS

• Tom was created to be the human counterpart to my OC, Guiek, a mutant human Shy-Guy from my Super Mario Fan Fiction, Subconscious. His role was to play up the weaknesses that Senna overlooks in Guiek, who is a strong, warrior type, while still maintaining Guiek's neurotic and distrusting nature. Tom exemplifies the fear-driven chemical anatomy that drives Guiek to his violent neuroses in a more rational, self-effacing and pacifistic way, since Tom is the real, weaker face of both sides that Senna experiences. However, once I began to further develop Tom beyond this concept, I loved him enough to make him his own OC and cancel his presence in Subconscious all together.
• Tom's character is driven equally by sexual and logical energies, and is inspired from classic literature/20th century literary male characters who are submissive and impotent (power-wise) sorts, but are strong-willed and have some kind of inducing effect on their environment regardless. The primary and most enduring influence for Tom began as, and continues to be the character of Winston Smith from George Orwell's 1984. Other inspirations include John from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, George B. Wilson from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Robert Cohn from Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.
• William Moulton Marston, American Psychologist and creator of Wonder Woman, is a real life influence for Tom's future development as a character. Much like in Marston's work, I intend to have Tom take up an understudy of women and the maternal instinct to reconcile with his own masculine inadequacy. I'm excited to pursue this link further!
• Tom has a rule 63 counterpart who he was conceived alongside with. This female!Tom is named Greta, a covert femme fatale inspired by the character of I-330 from Yevgeny Zamyatin's dystopian novel, We. Although Greta is neither canon nor character, this creation still holds a special place with me, since it helped me develop Tom to contrast his subdued energy with her overt energy, kind of like an alter ego of his.
• During the course of his development and before I decided on Journalism as his career, I have given Tom the jobs of General Contractor (Subconscious) and CPA, neither of which he was purported to enjoy.
• I joke sometimes that Tom's worst nightmare would be to be married to my OC, Claire "Beige" Harvey, a fleshy and big-breasted sociopathic villain character who is shrill in voice and has over-the-top, GaGa-esque fashion sense.