a safe place

[empyreals]

if taemin were retelling his life story, he might admit that he remembers very little about his family life before his parents' divorce when he was 5. when they split, his father took custody of his elder brother, while he stayed with his mother, and by the time he had started 1st grade, he had only sporadic contact with that side of the family. taemin was 8 when his mother remarried, to a much wealthier man who had little use for a stepchild and perhaps resented the share of his mother's attention he received. to be fair, his mother was something of a helicopter parent, and he found himself pushed from one cram school to the next with scarcely a moment to breathe in between. whether it was due to her wishing to provide for his education with their newfound financial stability or her anxieties over his brother being effectively removed from her life, she seemed determined to map out every waking moment of his life. as he reached middle school, was sent to australia for one year (where he skipped a grade) and then enrolled in an international high school in seoul, the stress began to take its toll. taemin had few close acquaintances and no real friends, he often got no more than 4 hours of sleep in a night between studying, homework, tutoring, and private academies, and was under constant pressure to achieve top scores and berated whenever his grades threatened to slip. it should perhaps have been no surprise that, in the months leading up to his university entrance exam, he developed some distinctly unhealthy habits. taemin had never been fat, but some teasing about chubby cheeks and his baby face couldn't have taken root at a worse time. the combination of stress, a growth spurt, and lack of time to eat or sleep led to him losing a fair amount of weight before the end of his last year of high school, and people who had never spoken to him before suddenly seemed eager to praise his appearance, while others spoke cuttingly, accusing him of plastic surgery and other things. after the exams and his subsequent acceptance to university, he might have found himself suddenly relieved of huge quantities of stress, but he scarcely knew what to do with himself or all his free time. somehow, regaining the weight he'd lost was not a priority. and then he was losing more, counting calories and scheduling his meals to regulate exactly how much he ate, and when. he lasted about 6 months, completing one semester of his first year studies. then, he collapsed in the worst of the late summer heat one day, and while recovering on an IV drip at the hospital, doctors informed him in no uncertain terms that he was so underweight as to be seriously threatening his continued health and nutrition. it took hospitalization, a lot of unwanted and unappreciated therapy, and being sent to a program overseas for three months to get his eating habits and weight back into some kind of reasonable range. he was allowed to return to his university studies at last in august, nearly a full year after he had suffered his collapse, to pick up where he'd left off under the therapeutic conditions that he did not live in a house with his mother again and did not live in a dorm without some kind of trained supervision to prevent relapses.

name: lee taemin d.o.b: 1993/07/18 ♋ 鸡 year: freshman major: computer engineering minor: dance family: father, mother, stepfather, older brother (3 years older) ⚀ taemin is a bit of a whiz with computers. browser not working? BIOS error? RAM gone bad? he'll have the viruses cleaned off, your case open, and parts replaced without batting an eye. want to set up a home network? sure. want to know where to find that one porn video? pull up a chair. just don't ask him to explain any of it in terms you will understand. ⚁ dancing is his one truly physical hobby. he's deeply interested in it, is better than you might expect any comp engineering student to be, and the energy it demands of him may be the only reason he agrees to eat, sometimes. ⚂ achieved very high grades throughout middle school and high school, and on his entrance exam. is basically fluent in english. in university, he see-saws between cramming hard and letting things slide dangerously. has basically never learned to control or pace himself when it comes to studying wisely. ⚃ still manages to set things routinely down and lose them in ridiculous places. his cellphone has turned up in his desk-drawer, a kitchen cupboard, and a shoe at varying points. he often relies on someone else to be home to be let in, as his keys may have disappeared and he's probably forgotten the door code. ⚄ some people have school friends. not taemin. he's socially awkward, occasionally defensive, and a bit spacey. thinking too hard about his family life tends to leave him full of sullen rage and an incapacity to express it in any constructive way. he's a little bit of a rebel without a cause, and his style reflects his desire to fight against expectations. ⚅ his relationship with food is complicated. he counts and measures more than he should, and struggles with his logical mind telling him that his body needs fuel in order to function, and his emotional hangups informing him that there's nothing wrong with some structure in his diet even when the rest of his life is a leaf in the wind, and people like him much better when he's thin.