When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. This is best being practised by a young girl during these challenging times where we have to remain inside our homes for safety.
Janna Thomson is only 14 but she has already begun making her mark as a young musician and singer. Like millions of other people around the world, she along with her family is also forced to stay home in Qatar. She has, however, been trying to make maximum use of this time by rehearsing and learning more about music.
A British-Arab, who was born and bourght up in Qatar, Janna says has her dreams and ambitions to achieve like many other young girls. She is steadfast as far as her dreams of becoming well versed with music go, and believes the challenges thrown by the novel coronavirus outbreak will not affect her love for music.
Sharing about herself further, Janna told Community, “I participated in the Voice Kids last season and won the Qatar national music competition and currently I’m active on social media with over 5 million views and hundreds of thousands of lovely people who support me and encourage me across all social media platforms.”
When asked how she is trying to cope with the unusual phenomenon of social distancing, the talented girl said: “I am fortunate enough to be taught by my father that ‘when life gives you lemons, make lemonade.’ No matter what the circumstances are, you need to stay positive and find ways to productively deal with the situation you are in, whether is of your own making or forced upon you by nature or circumstances. I am just as scared as most people with regards to the coronavirus, it is unfortunate that young people like myself and my sister are faced with such a serious global challenge, we wish that we had not to experience this so early in our life time.
“However, we have taken positive steps towards social distancing, we setup our home environment to suit our needs and we had several family meetings to discuss ideas for study, work, entertainment and how to protect ourselves from being exposed to this awful virus. We setup a small gym at home with basic equipment where we hold family and individual fitness classes, we setup a space for movie nights where we watch movies together and we setup a great space for study times and enabled ourselves to study online and co-operate with friends and teachers to take on our study challenges. My mother is helping us daily with that and doing a great job supporting us even when we are non-co-operative. In addition to this, myself and my younger sister setup our hobby space where we practice music and painting and learning new skills online. In addition to all of these activities with my family, I spend some of my time talking to my friends online. My father also started holding Qur’an reading classes with us and we are very happy about that.”
The young singer is happy because staying at home has allowed her to have some extra time for composing new music and rehearsing. “Yes, I previously taught myself how to play piano and always wanted to learn to play guitar, and guess what? Now I have the time and I have already started to practice, and I am getting better all the time. I also have more time to share my singing and musical interests online with the rest of the world. I managed to create several videos and record several new songs and posted them on YouTube on my Janna Thomson Page and enhanced my Instagram account and gained many more followers and fans. I have also managed to work on my home studio and improve it so that I can finally produce a full art package.”
When asked what she has planned for future regarding creating new music, Janna said: “I recently completed and shared four new songs and managed to place my music on iTunes, apple music, Google Music, Amazon and Deezer and I am very happy about that. After all, I am still just a young girl, and hopefully will continue on my journey of self-discovery and share my music with many more people around the world.
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