Dr. William Wallace's Questionnaire

Dr. William Wallace lives in Seattle, Washington. He lives here instead of anywhere else because he thinks that this is where he can make the biggest difference to people. It is a big city with many people with big sad, after all. He grew up in Idaho, where he found everyone to be stuck in their small-town, small-minded ways, and going to school at the University of Washington opened his eyes up to many things. (It also opened his bank account up to student loans). He fell in love with the city and decided to stay, opening up his own therapeutic practice downtown. He lives in a small studio apartment in a rundown apartment building not too far from his office, and he has filled his apartment to the brim with plants and books. It is cramped, cluttered, and perfect for him.

Will gets his money from his therapy patients, mostly, as well as from grants that he applies to in order to gain more resources to help his patients. His patients are a mixture of abuse victims and the unhoused that he takes on pro-bono, as well as rich tech bros and soccer moms who he charges big bucks (or who he charges their insurance for). He uses this money to pay his rent, pay his student loans, and pay for the upkeep of a small fitness studio that he rents out a few times a month in order to hold self-defense clinics for his patients that need them. He makes sure that his therapy office and his self-defense clinics are stocked with snacks, tea, fidget toys, water, comfy blankets, and whatever else his patients may need while they're with him. He spends very little money on himself, but when he does, it's on plants, books, or his unending caffeine addiction.

One day, Dr. William Wallace will see this world become a better place, with affordable (read; free) supports for mental health, improved education systems, safer streets, and better housing and childcare options worldwide. This will, in his opinion, solve the increasing mental health crises that plague the world... his ultimate Ambition.

He would go incredibly far to achieve this, putting himself into poverty and extreme danger to do so. He has always had a patient-first mentality, something that his own therapist chides him for as he has a hard time remembering to use the own advice he gives his patients. Things like self-care, eating, paying the electricity bill, drinking water, etc., can often be forgotten by him when he is busy trying to figure out how to make things better for someone.

As a doctor (he is a trained and licensed psychiatrist, and had to pass through all of medical school before he could specialize in psychiatry), he has sworn the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm. He believes in this very strongly, and would have an incredibly hard time killing someone. At the same time, however, he has heard tales of some of the worst of humanity from his patients, and has seen some of it up close himself. He teaches self-defense clinics for a reason, and is quite capable of hurting someone in order to defend himself or others, should he have to.

When he was finishing his residency in psychiatry, Will was walking home from a bar after drinks with classmates one night when he was ambushed on a side street and a group of ruffians attacked him in a horrific mugging. Angry to find out that he had nothing on him aside from an ORCA card and $20 (he was a broke student, after all), they pulled switchblades and took out their rage on him before leaving him bleeding in an alley. He staggered his way into an emergency department where the kindly social worker inspired him to look into a career in therapy; with the goal of being able to build better ongoing patient relationships than he would as a psychiatrist. The incident changed Will physically and left him with several scars across his torso, a couple across his legs, and one through his eyebrow and forehead. It also gave him the burning desire to learn to fight back and give others the tools to do so as well, while working towards a world that would make it so that no one needed those tools; a world where people with rage such as his attackers would have safety and other avenues to express it.

His therapist, Tabby, is probably the person he's closest to. When he began his residency in psychiatry, each of the students was assigned a therapist to help them deal with the stuff they were hearing about and learning about. He was assigned Tabby, a very patient woman who should have been able to retire ten years ago and will not be able to afford it for another ten, and he has been going to her ever since (it certainly helps that she takes his crappy Medicaid insurance). She has become a confidant, and is one of the few people who can point out to him when he is too deep into something and needs to step back to take care of himself. She is also the person who helped him detach himself from the atrocities that he is hearing and seeing with his patients, in order to not sink too deeply into a dark place.

Penelope, the owner of his favorite local bookstore, has become a good friend as well. He helps her apply to grants in order to get resources for local students, and she helps him advertise his self-defense clinics to those who might need it most. He also cat-sits for her as needed, and helps keep her bookstore in business. She is funny and sharp as a tack, but not the most business-minded, so their friendship is good for them both.

Andrew, his landlord who he kind of hates. Andrew inherited the building from his dad and has done nothing to keep it up, and insists on trying to raise the rent more than is legal. Will has brought in legal assistance each time this happens, trying to help out the others in the building who don't have as much knowledge or resources, but he has been making a bigger target for himself every time.

Will grew up in foster care, moving in and out of different group homes as he struggled to find a family willing to taken in a scrappy, snarky little boy who refused to back down from a fight. He mellowed out a bit over the years (or in other words, was beaten down by the foster care system) and aged out at 18, moving straight into a college dorm for a summer program before entering his pre-med degree. He never met his biological father, but his biological mother was in and out of his life over the years as the state tried to help her towards reunification. Unfortunately, she could never hold down a job or apartment long enough even if she had wanted to be in Will's life, which she just didn't really want to be. He had a few foster parents that tried to check back in on him over the years, but none that he was particularly close to. His social worker, Abigail, became as much of a motherly figure as she could with a very large caseload and very little resources. She taught him to love books, to hold his tongue in the right situations, and to be a compassionate listener towards others and their situations.

He attended public school, bouncing around to different ones due to the group homes never quite being close enough to each other. As a result, it was always hard to make friends and to fit in, but he always managed to find kindred spirits in the library.

Not being able to help a patient, and losing them to the battles they face with mental illness or having their struggles get worse and worse over time. He has had this happen before, and it is always hard to not take personally; he worries that if it happens many more times, he will become callous and hardened. He works hard to compartmentalize and take care of his own mental health, but he is so afraid of not being able to do that.

Not being able to find love again. He truly believes in love, and sometimes even in soulmates, and he leads a much better lifestyle when he's in a relationship. However, he keeps odd hours as a trauma-informed therapist and self-defense instructor (not to mention as a Contractor), and he isn't allowed to talk about his work with any of the three jobs. He worries that those would turn someone off, and he admits that they do make it hard to meet people, as well.

Seeing the world completely unravel, and be unsavable. He feels that this draws closer year by year as he watches election cycles, climate change, and geopolitics with an increasingly anxious eye. He desperately wants to make a difference, and is afraid that the world will fall to pieces before he is able to gather the resources necessary to begin saving it.

His collection of books. Some of them have come all the way through foster care with him, some were gifts from his social worker, and the others have been compiled over the years once he began working and was able to spend his own money for the first time. As a result, it's a terrible hodge podge of genres, and some of them aren't even books that he particularly likes. However, each of them holds a memory of where he was in his life when he first read it, and he can't bear to get rid of them. Some of his favorites are his fantasy and science fiction books, where he feels like he can escape to a better world. These ones are dog-eared, worn down, and some of the oldest ones don't even have lettering on the spine anymore. He always has at least one in his laptop bag, and will happily lend them out to friends (although he'll track them down after a month or so to make sure he's getting the book back).