matthews, zelda kyra

selena gomez; 16; straight; local ; secretary


name zelda kyra matthews
age sixteen
sexual orientation straight
job she's a secretary and is living off that and royalties from her book "A genius life".
major
living situation She lives in the apartment next to her cousin Liam's.
height 5'3
weight





Is there a difference between madness and genius? I've made myself question that. At the age of seven, I was diagnosed with "childhood schizophrenia." Childhood schizophrenia is described as "one of several types of schizophrenia, a chronic mental illness in which a person loses touch with reality (psychosis). Childhood schizophrenia is essentially the same as schizophrenia in adults, but it occurs early in life — sometimes even before the teen years — and has a profound impact on a child's behavior." by the mayoclinic website. People consistently connect 'schizophrenic' with 'insane'. I am very much sane. I'm not a danger to other people. I'm not going to hurt you. I will have my moments and days but i am not dangerous. I am schizophrenic and I have social anxiety. I am not a monster. I am not scary. If I didn't tell you I was schizophrenic, you likely wouldn't know.

I guess we should start from the very beginning though..

My parents are Emma and David Matthews. They met at eighteen in a small town in New York. They hit it off and moved to California to pursue their dreams of acting. Shockingly at nineteen they moved to California and got married in Vegas. They spent the next six months of their lives poor and landing small acting jobs. They did things like commercials, extras or people who only said a line or two in shows. My mom got her first big break. She was the lead on a new TV series. Six months later, my dad got a good acting job. Things were looking up. Things kept going up, and up, and up and up. Eventually by time they were twenty two they were common household names. Ever heard ‘it’s lonely at the top’? It’s also very stressful at the top. My parent were fighting so much that they had to take a break. That’s when my mom found out she was pregnant with me. My parents started working on their marriage and nine months later I was born.

My parents tried to keep me out of the spot light as much as possible. They wanted me to have a pretty normal life. My parents found that at two years old I was never going to have a normal life. At three I read my first words. I couldn’t read much, apparently but I read the title of a book my mom handed me for the first time. When I did that my parents looked down at me and asked “How does she know the name of the book? Everything kind of went from there. I was talking, walking, reading and able to hold conversations before other kids could. By time I was two and a half it was very obvious I was different. I was doing things other kids couldn’t. I could do basic math and read clocks. My parents didn’t know what to do.

Some of the symptoms of childhood schizophrenia are language delays, late walking and late crawling. This wasn’t the case. My parents didn’t know what was wrong with me. I didn’t have those signs so what were they supposed to think? At four or five I was having very vivid hallucinations. I was taken into doctor after doctor and they just came out with the same thing: I don’t know. They didn’t use the word “schizophrenia” to describe me until I was six or seven.

A genius with childhood schizophrenia, eh?

My parents kept thinking that they could “get my mind” off of the hallucinations. This is where the real trouble started. I was being pressured to be perfect as my mom ignored the fact that I was schizophrenic. Things take a violent turn soon. I was eight years old when I went into a children’s TV show. When people were doing my makeup, I would scream and kick that spiders are on me. I’d cry for my mom. I had attracted the most attention from people so everyone was told to make do and deal with the crazy child. At home, I was getting worse. I was getting smarter and smarter. My mom had put me into real school until I refused to go. It was getting so boring at school. I knew everything they were talking about. Getting put into a private school was my parent’s next step.

“Save me. Get them away,” I specifically remember crying into my mom’s chest as I frantically tried to remove the millions of small spiders that were trying to climb up my arms. My mom didn’t know what to do and pulled me into her stomach. She promised me that after my contract ended I could go off the show, be home schooled and deal with my “problem”. A week later I had an interview. That’s when I had my first panic attack and knew the true meaning of “anxiety”. I had a panic attack on the live show. I was known as the child star mess.

My mom took her promise and didn’t resign my contract at ten. I dropped out of regular school and got a at home teacher. At ten years old I had the mind of a college student. Think of it like this: “When a genius looks at a tree, he instantly takes in not just its natural beauty but its scientific complexity: the ornate fractal patterns of its branches; the inscrutable calculus of its emotions; the gentle hissing of its photosynthesis [2]. A genius like me has upwards of four thoughts about a tree before he even leans in to take a bite of it.” That was written by a lovely online blogger named Thorpe.

Being a schizophrenic genius crippled my social life. I had major anxiety and no real friends. Any time I tried to make friends with my mom’s friends it didn’t work out. I’d try to tell them things about religion, evolution and the history of bats in Chinese culture. Just like Thorpe wrote again “Being as how I am smart, I have a way with words, and I can command the English language with great verisimilitude-- see? When I speak, I can often come up with very smart-sounding things right on the spot, like this: "I find that Gallagher had quite an intractable episteme on the dialectic of symbology." Everything I say sounds like I wrote it down before I said it, and everything I write has plenty of exotic punctuation, like the semicolon, which is what you use if you want to write some more but your sentence seems like it's over; but then it's not over.” I was likely too much and even semi intimidating to the children.

It was never a secret to me that I was a genius. I always kind of knew. It was never a huge realization or moment where someone in the many IQ tests centers told me my IQ number. It was always something that as apparent to me.

Being a genius is lonely. I’ve always been a lonely person. My parents have always been and are still acting so I’d be at home just having interactions with a nanny and my tutor. Being a genius is lonely because it’s hard to talk to people. I can’t come to a party and have someone ask me ‘So what have you been up to?’ and say that you’ve been looking at Einstein’s theories. I happened to run into two people who were more or less life savers to me. They didn’t mind that I was a little off at times. I was fine to a lot of people and they didn’t mind when I rambled on about theories and nature. These two boys came in the form of boys a year older than me named Cameron and Caleb.

My mom may seem like a good mom at this point but she really is a little crazy. I was being constantly pressured and screamed at to do better. Nothing I did was ever good enough. Eventually I was retreating to Cameron and Caleb’s house for two or three days at a time. I had been somewhat violent around eight or so but after a couple outbreaks of hitting I hadn’t had anything too major. Caleb kept trying to hug me, joking around and I completely went off in a violent rage.

I graduated a year or two later at thirteen years old. My mom’s pressure had gotten me to get out of school. Around this time my schizophrenia was being dealt with better. I was on the right medicine and I was overall okay. I was dating Caleb and best friends with Cameron. Something odd was happening though. I was growing a fear or everything. A lot of people were looking at me and saying “Well you’re a genius? What more could you want?”. I had left high school with two things only: major anxiety and a piece of paper.

Caleb was becoming more and more suicidal when I was fourteen. On the night of March 20th he killed himself. I was in love with him and it hurt like hell. I was going to go to Yale that year but ended up being too emotionally distraught. A lot of people who are so smart are not good with emotions. I’d be one of those people. I’ve shut it out. I hope I never have to deal with it again.

My mind is a sponge and I’m constantly absorbing. I had written a book in secret and now I was going on a book tour. It felt like everything was going so fast. While on book tour I found something out; My mom had told the media about my disorders before my book came out. I didn’t say anything while we were on tour. I didn’t want to ruin our trip but I was upset. It just felt like she had betrayed my trust. After vacation I spent the next year in Yale. I was living alone in a dorm. After my freshman year of Yale ended I came home for the summer.

That’s when I decided to get emancipated. It was a long process but it was worth it. I had trust funds, I was working a summer job and I seemed to have my life together to them. The truth was that I shouldn’t be emancipated. I can barely function in normal society.

she will be attending UCLA because it's an hour away ((according to google maps))


zelda cannot stand up for herself. despite her power if a person started screaming in her face, she'd back off. zelda cannot handle herself well because she doesn't know how to handle people. zelda isn't confident when she does things. despite her intelligence she has to look over her work four or five times before she feels comfortable turning it in. zelda has general anxiety and social anxiety. people make her nervous and she often has to separate herself from people to calm herself down. zelda thought this would stop when she was changed but it's just made her more anxious knowing what is out there. when zelda finds someone who is protective of her she gets dependent on them. she doesn't really get clingy or anything but just she depends on them to order for her and things like that.