♪ Giving second chances I don't need all the answers Feeling good in my skin I just keep on dancin'
And if we're here long enough We'll see it's all for us And we'll belong
Maybe we can Find a place to feel good And we can treat people with kindness Find a place to feel good ♫
BASICS.
full name: margaret elizabeth allen
age + birthday: twenty-eight | 03/13/1992
gender + pronouns: cis female | she/her
sexual & romantic orientations: demisexual/panromantic
hometown: new orleans, la
occupation: art therapist
personality traits: empathetic, enthusiastic, optimistic, altruistic, sensitive, gullible, cautious, stubborn.
looks like: melissa benoist
FAMILY.
mother: kate allen
father.: chuck allen
siblings: lowell channing ( step brother, 32 )
other important relationships: majorie allen ( maternal grandmother )
pets: she has 2-3 foster pets at any given time and it takes everything in her not to adopt them all.
CHARACTER.
wester zodiac: pisces
chinese zodiac: monkey
primal sign: cheetah
hogwarts: hufflepuff, through and through.
one song: used to be mine - sara bareilles
one book: wicked - gregory mcguire
one movie: meet the robinsons
BIOGRAPHY.
tw: parental abandonment, anxiety
For as long as Maggie could remember, it had been her dad and her against the world. The gruesome twosome. Bonnie and Clyde. Collectors of take-out menus and mavens of Saturday morning Cartoons. Maggie knew she had a mother -- one who loved her very much despite never being around to tell her as much -- but apart from having her eyes and blinding smile, she knew very little else about her. Just that she left before Maggie learned to speak her first words and they’d lost track of her after that. And the look of sadness in her father’s eyes when she spoke of her, leaving crumbs and tidbits -- hints at stories, each of which Maggie collected like treasures -- left her feeling like she shouldn’t press. They were fine, just as they were.
It wasn’t until Chuck started dating that Maggie found herself asking questions she’d previously kept close to her heart -- what had happened to her mom, and if she loved her so much, why had she never been around? At just eight years old, her dad finally sat her down and laid it all down. How her mom had packed up her things and left Maggie with a sitter. How she’d moved her life across the country to get a fresh start. How he’d wanted to follow, but put Maggie first. How she loved them very much but wasn’t fit to be a mother. But she knew they were in New Orleans, and he would always welcome them back into their lives if she was ready, but that he needed to move on. After that, Maggie’s whole world shifted. The smile she’d once admired saw differently on her lips. Those big blue eyes haunting her in the mirror because they were hers. She couldn’t help but wonder what other parts of herself belonged to her mother, and who she might one day hurt because of them. The thoughts consumed her, but her dad had enough on his plate and Maggie worried she’d only stack it too full so she learned to bottle them up. Putting all her fears and anxieties in neatly packed boxes to be dealt with later.
It was six months of helping her dad get dressed for first dates that went nowhere and awkward meetings with women who had little interest in being stepmothers, but when Chuck met Birdie, Maggie’s world would shift again. At first, Maggie was wary but quickly noticed the differences quickly. Her dad was walking taller. When he talked about Birdie, his voice softened and his smile lit up the room and by the time they went on their first date as a family, Maggie knew it was for keeps. Birdie and Lowell felt safe, like home. Maggie didn’t have to worry about her dad’s heart anymore, because it fit perfectly in Birdie’s hands. Their fridge was full of fresh produce instead of plastic containers and she watched Saturday morning cartoons with her new brother, her life felt settled.
Until it was uprooted and moved to a coastal town in Maine for a job. The first few months in Somerton were miserable for Maggie. While she’d always had such an easy time making friends at her old school, she had trouble connecting with her new peers making adjusting to her new life even more difficult. Lunch was eaten in the bathroom alone, books read on the playground, and in the classroom, she kept to herself. But it didn’t take her cool older brother long to notice, and just as quickly as she’d lost her footing, she found it again and by the time she was ready to graduate middle school she had curated a small group of true friends.
High school would be the start of a whole new era, for Maggie. Walking the halls with a solid support group gave the previously shy girl the confidence to put herself out there. Dive in headfirst and explore interests she’d been too timid to pursue in the past. Maggie took drama, auditioned for show choir, learned to play the ukulele (and later guitar), even joined the debate for a minute or two. But it was building sets for the school production of Fiddler on the Roof, that she found her true passion in art. There was a sense of calm in hours spent building props and painting backdrops. Zen. Something clicked. For the second time in her life, Maggie knew what it felt like to be at home. Once she started, she couldn’t stop. Maggie became a collector of notebooks, filling pages with watercolored scenes and charcoaled faces and poetry. She didn’t know it yet, but all that art journalling was helping her work through some things she’d long since pushed away deep in her subconscious. Relationships strengthened, grades were at an all-time high and by the time she was ready to leave the halls of Bursted Park High, she felt ready to take on the world.
Family-oriented and frugal, Maggie lived at home all through her degree at Somerton University (go seahorses!), where she studied visual arts with a minor in creative writing. But when it came time for graduation, she had no idea what to do next. So much of the last four years of her life had been spent finding herself in friendships and romantic endeavours, bolstering the people around her with a seemingly unending supply of optimism and enthusiasm. But apart from a good relationship with some local galleries, she had no real path into the real world.
She spent the first three months after graduation wallowing on her parents' couch, watching far too much television to distract from the very real anxieties she felt. Had she just wasted the last four years of her life? What if she never amounted to anything. But Maggie knew a person could only sit still for so long feeling sorry for themselves before they had to pick themselves up and do something about it, and so she did just that. She started looking for work around town, jobs to keep her busy during the interim. As always, it would be her family who guided her where she needed to be. After all, she came from a family of helpers, it seemed only fitting she join the family profession. Within a year she doing her master’s in art therapy out of state, but the pull of family would always lead her back to Somerton. As much as a desire to enrich the community that helped raise her.
These days Maggie primarily works with children in foster care as well as those stuck in the hospital, helping them work through the trauma of their unique situations and giving them tools to work through whatever cards life has dealt them. In her spare time, Maggie can be found hogging the mic on karaoke nights, attempting to beat every escape room in Maine, and fostering senior cats and dogs from the local ASPCA.