Post by Sylvie Robards on Aug 5, 2012 18:38:09 GMT -5
| [atrb=cellSpacing,0,true][atrb=border,0,true][atrb=style, width: 460px; background-image: url(http://i44.tinypic.com/34fb0ns.jpg);-moz-border-radius: 0px 0px 0px 0px; -webkit-border-radius: 0px 0px 0px 0px; border: 4px ridge #9c5f5b, bTable][tr][cs=2] sylvie antonia robards. twenty-five. therapist. edita vilkeviciute. | |
[rs=2] | Born on the 23rd of July 1998, Sylvie was the second of the four Robard children, and right from the moment of her birth was as different from her older sister Florence as she could possibly be. Whereas Florence had been demanding and the centre of attention from the moment she took her first breath, Sylvie was quiet and placid, rarely fussing and smiling sweetly at the adults surrounding her. The pair formed an unusual double act as toddlers, and could quite happily be left to their own devices as their parents cooed over the new arrival of baby Lavinia less than a year after the birth of Sylvie. Their completely contrasting personalities complemented each other well in those early years, and this start set the tone for the rest of their childhood: Flo would take charge and storm in, and Sylvie would later fix whatever messes she had made. When Leighton was born, Lavinia automatically tagged along with Florence and Sylvie, and their games expanded to include a trio rather than a duo. But as everyone knows, it's a rare group of three that remains a three, and there is always one that is left out. Now the fact that Sylvie was so different from Florence and Lavinia began to work against her, rather than in her favour. As Florence and Lavinia grew up and only got more alike, Sylvie spent more and more of her time sat on the sidelines, not entirely comfortable being a part of the scrapes the girls gleefully found themselves in. She began to spend more time 'helping' with Leighton, and was rewarded with his adoring loyalty and the ability to bring him out of his shell a little more than anyone else. Her first instances of magic were brought about because of a desire to please little Leighton - in an attempt to make him smile at her, five year old Sylvie accidentally managed to conjure brightly coloured bubbles which floated around the room for a good five minutes: Leighton was delighted, Sylvie shocked. When Florence left for school, Lavinia was the Robards sibling suddenly left without an ally, and so Sylvie and Leighton's little pairing - which in comparison to the girls' prior trio was not quite as successful, the four year age gap meant that six year old Sylvie was actually really looking after Leighton than playing with him - became another group of three. Lavinia easily had the dominant personality, and so mounted an almost militant coup for control with relative ease. With Leighton's sticky little hand in hers, Sylvie was happy to follow where Lavinia lead merely because it made Lavinia happier that way. When Florence returned, however, the equilibrium was upset again and Sylvie relinquished the company of Lavinia to her elder sister once more. The two were never quite as close after that, Lavinia continued to be inseparable from Florence, and Sylvie was left out. She didn't mind, she had Leighton to keep an eye on, and was sweet enough to easily make friends with the village children, but she still felt the slight of loneliness keenly, albeit secretly. This hurt was compounded by her parents' preoccupation with both Florence and Lavinia due to their constant trouble-making. Whatever Sylvie did, Poppy and Gawain's attention was always (by necessity, to be fair to her mother and father) on Lav and Florence. She found herself resenting them slightly as she grew up, and this only caused the gulf between her and her sisters to widen. Sylvie's departure for Hogwarts proceeded - as with everything else in Sylvie's life up to this point - with very little fuss or unnecessary tumult on her part. She boarded the train with Florence, who immediately abandoned her, a feeling that Sylvie was used to by now. She found a compartment and sat in the corner, only speaking to offer the other occupants (other first years: some terrified, some not) some of her Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans, a rare parting treat from her mother for the train. This gesture of goodwill guaranteed her inclusion into the little group, and by the time the Hogwarts Express had reached Hogsmeade Station, Sylvie had a small and tentative friendship group. She was sorted into Ravenclaw after a lot of deliberation on the Sorting Hat's part: it debated placing her in Hufflepuff, mostly because the events of the train ride were still at the forefront of her mind. Sylvie was the only Robards sibling to be in Ravenclaw, and although she was happy there, it only served to exacerbate her exclusion from her sisters. Despite the difference in Houses, the extra year Sylvie had on Lav meant that she heard more of the sometimes spiteful (although often equally true) rumours about Florence. Few believed that Flo and Sylvie were actually sisters, and those who knew her instantly rushed to defend the caring and well-liked Sylvie when the gossip was occasionally deflected onto her by relation. When Florence tried and failed to commit suicide and then was discovered to be pregnant in Sylvie's second year, Sylvie's world began to crumble. She had always - sometimes begrudgingly, but nevertheless - looked up to Florence as her headstrong, fearless and strong older sister. She had seemed infallible, yet now Sylvie was the one pushed into the position of authority generally held by the eldest. Despite being scared for her elder sibling, Sylvie tried her best to keep it together for Lavinia and her parents' sake. She tried to look out for Lavinia at school, but the age and House difference made it difficult, and Lavinia made it very clear that she didn't want or need Sylvie's friendship or help. Undeterred, Sylvie made it clear that should Lavinia ever change her mind, she would be there waiting for her. The strain of trying to hold everyone else up put pressure on Sylvie though, and the first signs of her future eating disorders became apparent. At the tender age of twelve, Sylvie's relationship with food and her own body began to deteriorate, something probably worsened, she was later told by a Healer, by the normal onset of puberty and an innate desire to hold on to the safety of childhood. Unlike Lavinia, Sylvie's studies did not suffer as a result of Flo's actions, but rather her grades increased. It was hard to see this as entirely positive, however, because as Sylvie's work improved, her face began to become paler and slightly pinched looking, the strain evident. The summer after her second year, her niece was born. Whereas Lavinia instantly took a shine to the baby girl, Sylvie was still more worried about Florence. The night that Florence ran away to a party, less than a week since she'd returned from the hospital with a daughter, it was Sylvie that knew where she'd be, and it was Sylvie, before Florence was sent away for treatment, who crept into her room in the middle of the night to watch over her whilst she was sleeping, spending more hours than she could count there that summer. Like Lavinia, Sylvie too did not want to return to Hogwarts the next year, but her priority was Florence and not the care of Esme. Sylvie's third year passed without significant event: her eating habits continued to err on the odd side, but not to an extent that anyone was particularly worried; and her friends noticed that she became a little quieter once more, but that was all. She began a secret but regular correspondence with Florence that continued until Florence checked herself out of hospital on her seventeenth birthday. The re-establishment of contact between the two eldest Robards siblings created a modicum of stability in both of their lives, and the two became mutual confidants in a time when they both had great need for one, although the innocent competition of their childhood was lost forever. The exchange of letters and secrets also meant that Sylvie became privy to the intense mental suffering of her older sister, and as her third year at Hogwarts drew to a close, Sylvie began to feel the weight of her sister's confidences and the familiar pressure resettled around her shoulders. Although, like her siblings, she'd been taught to ride from an early age, and was competent enough at it, Sylvie never quite possessed the passion for it that Lavinia and Leighton had. She took up dancing instead, and her teachers were amazed to find that shy and quiet Sylvie had an innate graceful elegance and the ability to dazzle an audience onstage. As a result, in the summer after her third year, when their parents agreed to send Lav and Leighton away to a horse camp in order to provide a distraction from their turbulent home life, Sylvie begged to be sent away to a residential dance school for the summer, and was accordingly allowed to go, a decision that would later haunt her parents, although Sylvie believes that her eating disorders would have occurred regardless. The regime of the summer school was strict and relentlessly punishing. For eight weeks, Sylvie did nothing but dance for at least ten hours a day, endlessly striving along with everyone else to reach perfection. She practised battement lents, cabrioles, fouetters and jetes for hours on end, often putting in extra hours of practise during the short lunch breaks and after others had gone to bed, and as the summer progressed, the amount Sylvie ate decreased. This was due to many reasons: partially as an almost reflexive response to the increasing despair of Florence's letters (unlike her younger siblings, Sylvie was not able to simply stop worrying about things at home), partially to try and reach a lighter weight in the hope that it might improve her dancing yet further, even partially because she'd never been away from home to anywhere other than school. Either way, the long days of intense physical exercise and the lack of nutrition combined to make Sylvie lose a dramatic amount of weight. She began to faint, occasionally, but all to easily put it down to other factors - she was too hot, she wasn't sleeping well, she'd just missed her footing. She arrived home with plenty of praise from the dance teachers at the academy - Sylvie was 'talented', a 'potential future professional', 'possessed of a unique style and determination' and, they all agreed, 'definitely one to watch' - but also a brittle, waif-like quality which rightly worried her parents. Her summer away had given her the means to be devious, and she became good at appearing as if she was eating, when in reality the opposite was true. The grip of her eating disorder only increased when Sylvie returned to Hogwarts. Away from her family, it was easier to skip mealtimes completely amongst the natural chaos of hundreds of people. She knew her mother must have mentioned something to Lavinia, but it was simple just to avoid her sister completely, allowing herself to be sometimes strategically seen in the Great Hall. She continued to lose weight, adding extra exercises to her routine other than dancing, but was never happy with the weight on the scales or her appearance in the mirror. Her BMI dropped to about 16, her cheeks became unnervingly hollow and her eyes dark, she began collapsing more regularly and her once-beautiful hair became thinner and more brittle. She looked unhealthy, yet all she could focus on was that fact that if she continued to lose weight then she would gain control over her life and she would begin to feel attractive once more. It never happened, and by the time summer came around once more, Sylvie was practically skeletal, and had begun to self-harm, using razors to cut her thighs. She still bears the traces of those scars, crossing across her skin like battle wounds. Her friends barely recognised her as the Sylvie they'd first met on the train all those years ago. That summer after her fourth year, the one when everything finally shattered completely, Sylvie spent most of her time in her room, shutting herself away from those who desperately wanted to help her. The girl who'd once tried to help everybody was now sunk so low that she couldn't even help herself, and it was painful to watch. It was the summer before Leighton's first year at Hogwarts: he was talking less than ever and she knew she ought to be reassuring him that it would be all okay, that he would make friends, that it would be better than at home, but she just couldn't any more. Sylvie still remembers the night that Florence tried to drown her daughter, she wonders if Esme does or not. Her clearest memory of the night is sitting with Florence on the floor of the spare bedroom, holding her sobbing sister's shaking hands in her own painfully thin ones and desperately trying to make everything alright once more. They were two broken sisters that night, trying to meld the pieces back together in any way that they could. She remembers hearing the Healers come in to take Esme to St. Mungo's, and her mother desperately performing CPR on the child's tiny, prone form. She doesn't think that Florence truly realised what she'd done, and when her parents told Flo to leave the house, for the first time that summer, Sylvie was roused enough to show some real emotion. She pleaded, screamed and shouted at them, trying to make them see that Florence needed to stay and that she needed compulsory help, but to no avail: Florence had tried to murder their grandchild, she'd well and truly crossed the line. Two weeks before Sylvie, Lavinia and Leighton were supposed to leave for Hogwarts, the news Sylvie had been dreading since that awful, awful night arrived. Florence was dead, and nothing was ever going to be okay again. It was a fittingly horrific end to the summer, and Sylvie broke down completely. She stopped eating completely, unable to concentrate on anything other than dancing, still focused on attaining perfection. She lost the ability to hold a proper conversation with anyone, merely drifting through the house as she was in life in general, the melody of a sad, lilting tune sometimes on her lips, sometimes not. She saved her tears for the night-time only, in daylight hours she was as expressionless as a ghost. She can pin-point exactly her turning point, her salvation. Unexpectedly, its source was Lavinia, who crawled into Sylvie's bed one night. Sylvie pretended to be asleep, but she could still feel Lavinia's body curled against her thinner one, and she could still hear the words her sister whispered to her. The desperation in Lavinia's voice affected something within Sylvie that she'd forgotten how to make work anymore, that innate need to make people happier that she'd demonstrated as a child, the part of her that the Sorting Hat had considered for Hufflepuff. The next day, unbeknownst to Lavinia, Sylvie finally admitted to herself and to her mother that she was going to kill herself if she continued along her path. Her mother took her to the hospital - and to be the cause of her mother visiting there yet again hurt Sylvie more - where she was assigned a treatment plan, and regular appointments with both the school Healer and St. Mungo's were arranged. The process of recovery was a long and arduous one. Even now, Sylvie does not feel as if she has fully beaten her demons: she has good days and bad days, but the good now weigh out the bad. There were a few bumps in the road, and Sylvie relapsed a couple of times before her seventh year. As always, her dedication to her studies never faltered, and she achieved top grades in both her OWLs and her NEWTs. Sylvie became less introverted as she began to recover, blossoming out into the friendships that were mercifully mostly still where she had dropped them. She became once again known for her indiscriminate kindness and willingness to care, and those friends that had stuck by her through petty rumours all those years ago had also remained through her mental and home issues. Sylvie had never been more grateful to any group of people in her life, and by and large, the friendship group has remained intact until this day. Sylvie got her first proper boyfriend at the end of her sixth year, losing her virginity to him just before the Christmas of her seventh. It didn't last past the next Easter - though sometimes she wonders what might have happened if it did - but there was a certain purity to their love that spoke of promise for the future, a reassurance that things would still continue to get better. As she gradually began to get a handle on her anorexia at last, Sylvie was able to reach out to Leighton when he truly needed her, spending endless patient hours with him in an effort to get him to speak once more. They worked out a kind of sign language in order to converse non-verbally, and she translated for him for his peers when he needed it. She gradually encouraged him to speak once more, first just sounds, then whispering, and then finally, one glorious day in her seventh year, he said her name. A month later, he could manage a sentence in a normal conversation, and by the end of the year, although shy - he would never be classed as talkative - Leighton could talk once more. The sense of achievement they both felt in surpassing everybody's expectations was beyond brilliant, a glimmer of hope in their still sometimes generally hopeless lives. It was this, along with her own and Florence's experiences that decided Sylvie's future path in life. She wanted to help kids like they had been, the broken and damaged children who needed someone to turn to. She therefore began to train to be a psychotherapist, specialising in children and adolescents. Her approach is patient and gradual, and her strength is in building up a trusting relationship with individuals who are referred to her. She deals with a wide variety of issues, from the bereavement, mutism and eating disorders she has been familiar with since her own teen years, to other problems. Now Sylvie is an acclaimed and professionally regarded therapist, acknowledged to be one of the best in the business. She works in association with both hospitals and charities, and every shattered soul she soothes feels like a little tribute to Florence, the one she couldn't help. She's still working on her relationship with Lavinia - she doesn't know if it'll ever be perfect, she thinks they might just be too different - but she dotes on her two young nephews, and often has Esme over to stop in the school holidays. She's currently single, but she makes a conscious effort to fill her life with enough supportive friends and family members that the ache of loneliness is something that never ails her for long. All in all, she's getting there. |
Cassie. 17. Some years roleplaying. GMT. |
I FORGOT THE ROLEPLAY SAMPLE.
