• The year that I, Jemzilla, kick-started my career.

First, though, I want to share with you a little bit about how my journey started, and my on-going battle with my self-confidence.

I started enjoying singing around the age of 4, listening, learning songs from the television and wanting to learn more.

Confidence was my ally and nothing was going to stop me.

By the age of 7 I was already writing my own words which I wanted to put to music.

However, due to family commitments, I moved to different parts of the world.

Therefore, this meant that just as I was starting to form my path, I was having difficulties such as forming lasting friendships.

Being an only child, and having been the ‘new girl’ quite often, it was always a challenge for me to ‘fit in’. I learnt early on that ‘fitting in’ was for some reason deemed one of the most important things in school, and that’s what I tried to do.

This started a feeling of not being good enough for others, not being myself to please others and ultimately, I was unhappy. For a very long time I hid myself to be something I thought was more important.

It wasn’t.

So, like a lot of kids, as I started to get older, my confidence (or lack of) became more of an enemy.

My singing was something that I previously loved as a young child and didn’t try to hide.

It slowly became my biggest embarrassment.

Through all of this however, I luckily had my parents to support me, but I still coped with most of my feelings myself.

Further down the line when I was in my mid-teens and coming to the end of high school, I was still in the same boat.

Then, as all of us know, COVID hit; which became another issue to overcome.

One minute I was a young teenager in high school, and the next I had left high school without doing any GCSE’s.

As I had been through difficult times previously in my life, I decided to use the situation as a catalyst for doing what I had always dreamed of ….

Becoming a singer/songwriter.

One of the biggest concerns was that, due to the difficult times I had been through, music wasn’t in the picture. I had lost my love for it.

Social media at the time did not help – it made me feel that there were others who had the same dream but were ahead of me.

I would get frustrated that I wasn’t in places that famous singers my age were in, without realising I wasn’t putting the right energy into doing so.

I focused so much on toxic relationships, avoiding music as I was fearful that people wouldn’t like my style, and looking at how I thought others would like to see me.

I was putting my time and energy into negative things and therefore, receiving negativity back.

Once high school was behind me, I got an apprenticeship in hairdressing whilst also making Tik Tok videos of me doing sfx makeup.

This was my attempt to try and make sense of the situation and trying to see what my future could look like.

However, once again, instead of focusing on how I could improve my music I focused on other things.

At the time I regretted my behaviour, because I always knew that I was pushing my music aside.

Then, one day, I changed that.

I can’t pin point the exact moment that I had inspiration again, but I started looking online as I had started to think about music again.

I started to ask myself questions like

‘why can’t I just do it?’

‘why can’t I sing like them?’.

I slowly started to turn these questions into

‘why don’t you give it your best shot?’

‘why don’t you practice more?’

‘why don’t you believe in yourself’?

My transition from having a negative mindset, coping with difficult situations like attending new schools often; the pandemic and finally unhappy work environments made me realise that to succeed in life I needed to have a positive outlook.

It took me a 3-month complete social media break and guidance from some amazing people in my life to have the confidence to find my magician of a producer… nothing is simple.

Personally, as a person, I have had more downs than ups, but its because of that hope that I’m so grateful to have, that I am still pushing on, and I hope you can too.

Now that I have released my own songs, heard them being played on radio stations; received feedback that they have been played in over 40 countries and enjoyed by listeners from young to old, I would suggest to any reader to try and look at the positive side of life.

I think in this day and age its easy to judge people, in more ways than one, but everyone has or is going through something, and most people are trying their best.

It is very important to know your fear (my next step is to start performing live, I am quite fearful of that) but I’m going to face it anyway.

The last twelve months have taught me that we are all capable of achieving what we want to as long we have that inner belief and hope.

I feel once again like that little four-year old that fell in love with music and had total confidence that this is what my life would be about.

To share my music but also to hopefully help others.

I look forward to sharing more of my songs with you…

Jemzilla