OOC: [personality]
Miles is a driven and demanding person both professionally and personally.
He can be deeply critical of others, but he never holds anyone to a higher standard than that to which he holds himself. He has a strongly ingrained sense of honour and duty and this has been amplified by his drive to make amends for his past by bringing to bear the values of truth and justice in the courtroom.
He’s a loyal friend most of the time, and strongly bound by an old fashioned combination of honour, loyalty and obligation to those that have performed a service for him. However, his tendency to suffer crushingly low moods thanks to some of the circumstances in which he has found himself has led to incidents where he has walked out on friends in the mistaken belief that he is saving them from pain or from embarrassment by association with him. These incidents are a source of regret for him and he has recently begun to learn to temper his behaviour as a result.
He can also crave solitude and this, taken in concert with his tendency to dramatic gestures, has contributed to doubt about his trustworthiness in the eyes of some of his friends.
He reads people extremely well, but unfortunately does not always have the skill set to turn that to his advantage by responding appropriately. He also struggles to handle people who do not respond in expected or familiar ways, and this results in a degree of awkwardness when interacting with others on anything other than a professional or commercial level.
When it comes to choosing friends he is extremely cautious and can be hard work unless one really sets ones mind to befriending him. He finds it difficult to trust even those he is closest to, and even more difficult to open up to them in any significant way. Relationships are rarely more than of a surface nature, whether they be sexual, platonic or business. Slightly pessimistic in his world view, he is inclined to question what he is told and look beyond the apparently benign for hidden motivations as a result of his past experiences.
He has an extremely logical mind, is quick to assess facts and come up with solutions and theories that match the evidence. He is a powerful debater and skilled in presenting arguments. However, he sometimes suffers from an inability to think on his feet or outside the box.
Many of these faults he is aware of, although that does not mean he can necessarily apply a quick fix. His ability to relate to people is improving but it is a slow process and his approach to it owes more to trial and error and the ability to learn than it does to genuine empathy. But he is a lot more open in terms of being supportive of others, even if he still keeps his own feelings tightly under control compared to most and is hampered by doubts about himself.
He can be extremely good company - he is witty, cutting and intelligent and has a surface knowledge of a lot of subjects that prepare him well for professional social occasions. However, if conversation becomes too personal he can soon find himself out of his depth. He's a deeply private man with a tendency to internalise everything, share little and guard his personal space very carefully. This is partly from inclination, partly from inculcation and partly from an deep-seated guilt about his past and a sense of failure that has haunted him for most of his life, for one reason or another. This latter also makes him prone to self-sacrifice out of the belief that he is automatically less worthy than others.
He has an instinctive fear of both elevators and earthquakes and probably will for the rest of his life - there are good reasons that he doesn't try harder to be free of these. The latter manifests as severe emotional trauma and blackouts and he has not used an elevator of any kind since he was nine years old. One of his ambitions in life is to move somewhere where neither are a necessary evil of everyday life. He also regularly suffers from unsettling dreams which run the spectrum from disturbed sleep to full-on nightmares related to various aspects of his past and present. This leads to a certain amount of sleep deprivation that he has learned to live with and use. He also has an aversion to climbing, and to firearms.
He has developed coping mechanisms to deal with a lot of his problems and they tend to centre around self-control, both mental/emotional and physical. These manifest in a variety of ways, most notably in his tendency to be a workaholic and to regularly push himself to the brink of exhaustion. His driving force is to make amends: to his friends, to the memory of his father, and to the hundreds, possibly thousands of victims of his early days as a prosecutor.