Carson Mackenzie

* illustration
* face claim, original
* face claim, current
* Doodle Face

> "Climbing trees and paper planes. Life as a kid, we're all the same. Tears of joy, and sullen hearts. Sticks and stones and broken arms"
>
> --Angels & Airwaves, LOVE

Carson Grace Rosemarie Mackenzie is the second protagonist of *The Apartment on 3rd Street* and the main protagonist of *The Lamppost on 6th Street*.

## History

Born to Trish Davis on November 30, 1991, Carson was left at Chicago Mercy Home Association and adopted by Casey and Aubrey Mackenzie at age two. They lived in a suburb [?? something about location].

Carson attended Johnson Elementary, Terry Welks Middle School, and North High.

Carson was diagnosed with Crohn's disease at age 14. During her teenage years, she was in the hospital for long periods being treated for her condition. She had minor depression until she met Sasha and Luke, who help her come out of the funk.

After her grandmother was placed into a home, Carson and her parents moved to a different suburb [which?], where they lived together for Carson's first few years of college. When she was 23, Carson moved into the apartment.

At [college], Carson met Sasha Rodriguez, who became her best friend. Through Sasha, Carson met Luke Phillips. When she joined the [track team], Carson met teammates Ethan and Mia Lazzari-Qian, as well as Mia's friend Blair Moore. Alongside Ethan, Carson became the de facto leader of this group.

## Behavior and Psychology

*"wow ok you look kind of intimidating at first because you're, wow, really tall and energetic but you're.... kind of a teddybear" --Lizzie's general train of thought regarding Carson; Cas, chat log 2015/11/20*
### Personality

Carson initially comes off as a "dunderheaded jock." Somewhat socially awkward, she is bad at reading the atmosphere and clumsy when it comes to personal space. Due to her large stature, she has always felt clumsy in her own body. ​​​​​​

Carson is something of an emotional rock for her friends. Even-keeled and not easily excitable, her easygoing nature tends to attract others. She has an earnestness about her that makes the others feel at ease when she's around, such that even the Blair tends to be less acerbic around her.​​​

### Habits

- gets up at butt o'clock in the morning to work out

Carson is "wholesome." She can be considered chaste, innocent in many ways. <Cas, chat log 2016/04/15> Even disregarding her illness-restricted diet, she would not have any interest in alcohol, and she curses once in a blue moon.

### Motivation

Carson wants to be strong both physically and mentally, but she doesn't see herself that way. Carson knows intellectually that she is physically very fit, but she has yet to internalize that she is emotionally strong as well. The feelings of being fragile when she first fell ill never left her.​​​​​​

### Ambition

Carson aspires to be a sports medicine doctor so that she can help people <more detail?>. She is currently on the pre-medical track at [college], and is working on a bachelor's degree in [??]. Her hope is to attain a hospital residency after graduating from medical school and completing a residency in orthopedic surgery. As a sports medicine resident, she would learn about athletic injuries while treating athletes under a doctor's supervision.

If her plans to become a doctor falls through, Carson's backup plan is to become a personal trainer. In this way, she has a rigid life plan, with specific goals that she wants to achieve, and she has not put stock into much else.

Greatest fear
Due to her experiences in having Crohn's disease, Carson is highly aware of her mortality and the fragility of the human body. Looking at the events in her life and the people she cares about, she questions why traumatic events happen. Someone once told her that without suffering, people wouldn't have compassion. In the end, she concludes that this is false, and that unfortunately, there is no reason for the awful things that happen. This gives her a lot of existential angst, but she learns to be ok with it--that the awful things just happened just because... not a thing such as fate

### Relating to Others

Carson prefers to be called "Mack" by her friends. In general, only her acquaintances and professors call her "Carson."

Although she's friendly and sociable, she struggles to have any strong feelings toward other people who aren't the other Nerds, including her own parents from time to time. Her "zen" personality, though deliberately practiced, is a defense mechanism, a way to control the world around her and inside her. Her monotone personality is a coping mechanism: the less energy she spends on her emotions, the more reserves she has just for existing.

Carson has always been somewhat aloof. She doesn't seem very aloof until later, when Lizzie actually starts to get to know her better. This comes her fear of someone getting closer to her and seeing her be weak.

## Appearance

Carson is an athletic young woman. Standing at about 6 feet, she is the tallest of her friends and is lean and muscular with a long neck, broad shoulders, and narrow hips. Her hands are large and strong, and her skin quite tanned from all the time she spends in the sun. She has a tall face with a long straight nose, strong sharp jawline, and striking hazel eyes. Her straight hair, which was dark when she was younger, has lightened to a chestnut brown. It is sun bleached and fluffy at the ends. She typically keeps her hair in a low ponytail, and she wears it higher when running.

### Mannerisms or Gestures

Carson's gentleness comes from her steady body language and frank personality.
She moves deliberately, slowly, and very consciously. She is always keenly aware of her space, always checking to see if she’ll fit, aware when her head is close to the corner of a high shelf, hand against a doorframe, body naturally angled because spaces can be a tight fit. Carson is an angular hare twisting this way and that to study her surroundings, a tol bean. She slouches somewhat and tends to lean forward when seated.

Carson worries that people can read her easily, which is part of why she purposely makes her face as blank as possible sometimes.

She is aware that her appearance can be intimidating, as people have treated her as intimidating in the past. She compensates by being as nontheatening and small as she possibly can. She can't do it physically, but she makes it a point to be amiable, to train her voice to be soft and her personality to be tranquil, to not let anger roughen her words. In this way, she struggles to emotionally free herself and behave naturally. In time, she grows comfortable to do this with Sasha, Lizzie, and Ethan.

Style of Dress

Carson does not wear makeup. Her clothing style is very simple, consisting mostly of athletic wear, and tends towards neutral or somewhat masculine presenting; feminine attire makes her too conscious of her genderweird feelings. She wears mainly tank tops and track pants. She has a hoodie that says, "Live, Love, Run." She wears mostly muted colors, earth tones. She has a drab olive green jacket she wears often and considers her favorite.

When Lizzie gets her bunny-themed clothing, Carson refuses to wear them. She eventually wears the fuzzy bunny slippers, but only around Lizzie. Carson dislikes wearing cute things due to shyness and a general discomfort about coming across as soft, which comes from her fear of vulnerability. People tend to find her height intimidating, and that makes her feel awkward. Wearing cute things on top of that makes her feel even more awkward.

[​​​​​​Prominent features or distinguishing marks?]

## Speech

Her voice is deep and resonant, coming from deep within her chest. Carson typically speaks softly but tends to ramble.

[tone of voice, language or accent, favorite phrases]

## Background

### Interests and hobbies

Carson's personal bookshelf is filled with books on sports, fitness, healthy diets, human anatomy, and medicine. Lizzie has tried scouring Carson's room for *something* not fitness-related. She found a pile of books related to lizard healthcare.

```
"wow these books aren't about exercising at all!"
"oh right. she has a pet iguana."

```

Carson's main hobby is running. She runs every morning and has many garments with motivational slogans. Of her track team, she is best at running (as opposed to, for example, jumping or hurdles). Her dedication to running is her motivation to stay as healthy as possible.
​​​​Carson is intrigued by the link between the physical and psychological symptoms that the nervous system can produce - a fixation from growing up chronically ill.

### Family

Carson has a good relationship with her adoptive parents, Casey  and Aubrey Mackenzie. Though obnoxious, they are sweet and supportive of their daughter. They endow her with many saccharine pet names, though she knows she is in trouble when they use her actual name.
She is out to them as queer.
Carson is an only child.

{following 2 paragraphs probably need to be condensed:

Carson loves her adopted parents, and while she is mildly curious about her birth parents, she doesn't feel much of a desire to know them. She doesn't like it when people ask her, "who are your *real* parents?"
Now in her late 30s, Trish was young when she became pregnant with Carson. She currently lives the next neighborhood over and works at a small local video store.

Carson is adopted, so she doesn't really feel like she has a heritage. This has always felt like a missing piece of her life, and she has always been a little scared about finding more about her background. The uncertainty of it, that maybe what she finds out makes her happy, or maybe she finds nothing, is heavy with the possibility of disappointment is. She's not particularly interested in finding her bio parents, but the question of where she came from and how she ended up here niggles at her. It's just another reason for her to feel displaced. Her ethnicity is uncertain, but she has some Dutch and Jewish ancestry.
}

### Current Home

Carson currently lives at [the apartment] in Chicago with her roommate, Lizzie Brooks, and her pet iguana, Princess Spikyback.

### Health

Carson was always sporty. As a child, she enjoyed running and playing basketball. After her Crohn's disease diagnosis, she took up track and field and became positively obsessed with health and fitness. She avoids all "junk" foods and drinks, including alcohol, and strives to eat and drink healthily. She is lactose intolerant. She does not cook. She subsists mainly on energy bars, raw fruits and veggies, and orange juice and water. Although she's sick of certain meals, she has them often because they're easy to eat. Such meals include oatmeal, vegetable soup, and papaya.

Her feelings on having Crohn's disease are difficult for her to dissect. Having had it for ever 10 years, she considers it simply something she has to deal with on a daily basis. However, it is difficult to live with, so it is not something she relishes talking about it, nor does she talk about it often. She feels resentment, bitterness, and grief.

Her friends and family know about it. <how do they treat the topic?>

### Sexuality & Gender

Partly due to her appearance, Carson has complex feelings about her gender and relationship to femininity. She has never felt aligned with femininity or female identity. She has always had issues with being seen as "female" but at the same time being seen as "masculine" for some of her features. She has complicated feelings about this, because she doesn't feel entirely male or female. She's also insecure about her features because she knows she's not conventional, which just adds another layer of shame for caring in the first place. Being unconventional makes her feel like an outcast.

With regard to her sexuality and gender identity, Carson's isn't sure about her labels. She has a hard time defining her sexuality because she has a hard time defining her gender. She questions whether she's a woman or not, and what it means to be a woman, since society rejects her as one but also demands that she be one. Is she not a woman because she doesn't feel like one? Are her feelings of not being a woman tied to how society treats her as not a woman or "the wrong kind" of woman? or are they her own?  Later in life, she comes to identify as nonbinary.

Carson is openly queer, though she doesn't go out of her way to either hide or flaunt it. She approaches romantic relationships in the same way she approaches cooking: by poking things with a 10-foot pole. She is "good with everyone's feelings except her own." She is bad at showing interest in people, though before Sasha she has only had mild crushes.

her gender issues relate to her sexuality issues. she isn't sure about her sexuality because she isn't sure about her gender. she isn't sure if she identifies as lesbian when she doesn't fully identify with being female. she has gender issues when it concerns feminine women. she's attracted to more feminine women, but she also feels dysphoric about femininity in general, because it brings up her issues twicefold and she questions if her lack of femininity is why she feels this way in the first place

Carson feels a great amount of discomfort with her body from the waist down.

Carson’s never really felt like a “girl”, partially because she doesn’t feel human (being chronically ill in this society...) and because she’s never felt like her body is a “girl’s” body (too tall, too long, too broad in the shoulders, etc)

"i like the idea of Lizzie being attracted to Carson because of those differences, rather than in spite of them" <2018/01/29>

### Self Image

"she has a zen personality in that she appears carefree and unbothered by everything when... that is not really the case often,,,

Carson is very aware of how much space she takes up, and she has tried her hardest to make herself smaller. Because of her size, people tend to give her a lot of breathing room. and a good chunk of it is because she's a woman (however unfitting the label feels but she's never quite felt like the right type of woman; being queer, too tall, too long, too broad-shouldered, too fit)
another chunk of it is because she's chronically ill and she's keenly aware of how much space she takes up with that - in the figurative sense. the space of how much time her parents had to dedicate to her health, how many doctors she needed to see, how many bills that piled up, how much her illness had to be front and center, how much "work" it took for her parents when she became sick. Carson's never not felt like a burden, so to speak"

Carson has really negative body associations. on top of being tall and feeling boyish and all the icky things society tells her about that, there’s also being chronically ill. yes she’s physically fit, but she’ll always feel fragile...

## Relationships

### Family

Joshua
Carson feels a kinship towards Joshua, her professor at [College] and the only other person she knows who has Crohn's disease. She looks to him as a mentor.

### Lizzie Brooks

*"she has a bad habit of dropping bombshells" - Cas, 2015/12/05*

See Relationships page for Carson's relationship with Lizzie.

### Sasha Rodriguez

They are best friends and have an intense relationship. See Relationships page for more information.

## Trivia

* Carson's patronus is the hare, or a bunny
* Her color is mahogany
* Lizzie gifts Carson a flash drive shaped like a bunny, to match her turtle flash drive
* Carson likes pirate humor, liking to imitate the accents and "swanky pirate attitude"
* She has messy handwriting and presses down hard on the paper.
* Carson wears tank top and shorts to bed.
* "one time a dude tried to kiss me and i ended up headbutting him and broke his jaw. it was an accident. i sent -him a get well card and a fruit basket." --Cas on Carson's relationship history, 2015/11/20
* Carson is not technologically inclined. She uses computers for two things: doing homework and subscribing to the channels of popular YouTube athletes and trainers. Her father bought her an iPhone, and she had to ask her friends how to install Instagram.
* (online AU?) Carson would not have a blog, or she would have an empty blog because she'd rarely use it, except for the sporadic moments when she reblogs everything fitness-related
	+ "i'm sorry Liz, i just don't get blogging? i reblogged a picture that someone else took! how is that blogging? WHAT DO YOU MEAN I DON'T GET TUMBLR?" / "the last time i kept a journal was when i was 12 Lizzie. a handwritten one. from my dad. NO I DON'T STILL HAVE IT, I WROTE LIKE 2 PAGES IN IT."  --Cas, chat log 2015/12/21
* Carson gets very moody around Halloween, so she mostly holes herself up in her room for the day.
* Carson would lose a dance battle amongst the nerds.
* If the nerds were in a band, Carson would play wind instruments.
* Sometimes, Carson dreams about disappearing. She feels exhausted when she wakes up and wishes the dream were a reality.

### Favorites

* Season(s): spring and fall, the months that have the most amicable weather in which to exercise.
* Foods: salmon, almond nut butter, carrot cake, pears, pretty much any potato dish. She tries to stay away from too much starch but can't always say no to a baked potato.
* Dessert: Sorbet.

### Dislikes

* Halloween.

* People walking on eggshells around her. She has a keen eye for when people are tiptoeing around her for whatever reason, and tends to get pretty cranky about it. It began when she first fell majorly ill and everyone started treating her this way.

* Nosiness: when people ask prying questions or pressure her to open up about herself.

* When people do inconsiderate or careless things, e.g. loitering, being loud in hospitals...

* Any notion that she is fragile and must be taken care of, because it reminds her of when she first got really ill. In that sense, Carson struggles with her sense of independence.

## Behind the Scenes

### Mixtape(s)

how i wish i could call your name (2015)ghost (2017)
​​​​​​

### Character Design

#### Face Claim

* Aubreigh Brunschwig
* Mia Mulder
* Alexandra Chelaru