Ever the tough and self-sufficient New York despite being seated in the lap of luxury for most of her life, Helen Stacy was everything that George Carmichael could have hoped for in a wife. She was fair, good mannered and respectable, intelligent and surely capable without throwing all femininity to the wind, and it seemed that until he could see a ring on her finger, as he did when he finally took a knee during the summer of her twenty-fourth year, George wasn't going to give up on chasing her. It didn't matter if her father had taken to a particular crassness, more to do with protecting his one and only daughter than anything to do with vehement disapproval, or that his own mother thought he could do better than someone so 'high and mighty', George and Helen were married and approximately eleven months after, following the ceremony, their honeymoon, and some house-hunting in Boston where she had always hoped to move, they gave birth to their first child and only child: Gwendolyn Carmichael.

Gwendolyn was born on September 2nd of 1989, sunny and bright in her disposition even if she didn't know what either of those words meant. She wasn't particularly fussy though there were quite a few moments where tears would get the better of her and late hours were spent making sure she didn't wake up the entire neighborhood, Gwen nothing short of daddy's little princess and her mother's spitting image. It made for quite a pleasant upbringing, even when trouble struck their family in Helen falling ill, terminally, and turning the once upright axis of the Carmichael family slowly over until it was in a perpetual wobble of doctor appointments, medical exams, radiation therapy and even surgery, never mind everything else that Gwen would end up dealing with while growing up.

In high school, she found her love of a lot of things in that journey of finding herself, a common face in numerous school activities ranging from volleyball and leadership to theater and A.P. studies, which did plenty to make her parents proud, but technology and communications always seemed to take center stage. She had even started playing drums after picking it up for a friend who had wanted to form a band, but could never seem to follow through on the rehearsals, never mind the actual skill needed to play a guitar, keeping with that until she could find some like-minded future musicians to jam with. He prowess in any and all of her studies, mandatory and extracurricular in nature, were small steps that would take her far and when the time came to consider colleges, something her parents were both wholly supportive of and capable of helping her with however they could, Gwen sought out something that could put those photography skills to good use; and as s soon as she graduated, Gwen had already prepared the next branch of the tree called life: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Worst case scenario? She didn't make it and took what credits she had and fell back into life as she had known it under her parents’ roof with a job instead of schooling to occupy her time. Best case scenario? Her studies didn't chew her up and spit her out, and in some semblance of success, she'd make it even if in the tiniest of triumphs. College life, thankfully, was something she acclimated to without much trouble. She had a roommate she loved despite all stories of troublesome and nightmare roommates she had heard browsing the web; she enjoyed her classes and, as she had in high school, seemed to excel without so much as trying; drugs and alcohol, more often than not, she avoided and therein negated the risk of dropping out for something as lowly as a fix; and she made friends, and good ones at that, who would become perhaps the best sources of strength and inspiration when she was almost sure the hard press of exams or studying would get to her.

Of course, while that was all going swimmingly, there was always the issue of finding work. Though she held a few odd jobs ranging from barrista to book store clerk to even a turn as a waitress which, despite the chance to interact with people of all walks of life, she didn't exactly take to as well as she would have liked, it wouldn't be until she found an opening as a Social Media Consultant that she felt she found a solid place. She got to interact with people near and far, brighten their days with sometime as simple as a post, and even took to her own social media ventures more readily as an effort to hone her skill and keep her pulse on the audiences for the much larger companies that could hire her. Beyond that, her social life in and of itself boomed, often found out and about to enjoy whatever the nightlife of Boston had to offer or playing gigs with the latest line of musicians who wanted to throw down even just for fun.

Job in place and college going swell, all that seemed left to do was graduate. In 2011, after a full four years of study and countless near freak outs as well as scholarly successes, Gwen graduated with her bachelor degree in Science, Technology, and Society with a minor in Art, Culture, and Technology which, all things considered, has only ever been put to good use. Graciously, she's content with life as is -- with her apartment in Boston secured just after graduation given some help from friends and a healthy savings, her place among the internet denizens and social platforms and perhaps even her love life which, by all accounts, might be dead on arrival, but who is so focused on that anyway when there is so much life to live?