She is proof that things get better. After being bullied at school, battling an eating disorder and dealing with a family break-up, Mikayla Jade is ready to shine on The Voice.
The 17-year-old Adelaide singer tells TV WEEK she was just five years old when her fellow school students started to exclude her.
“They just didn’t want to hang out with me,” she remembers. “They thought I was weird.
“I would take Finding Nemo to school and read it over and over, every recess and lunch. I’d just sit alone, reading, in the playground.”
Mikayla has been writing her own songs since the age of 15.
Meanwhile, at home, Mikayla was struggling to deal with another issue – her parents’ talk of divorce.
“That also helped me feel like I wasn’t worth sticking around for,” the talented youngster adds.
Mikayla started at a new school, but again found herself the target of bullies. When she was 13, feeling “very alone”, she took up music.
“I went in my school’s talent show,” she explains. “When I won it, all my bullies came up to me and said how much they loved my performance – even though they’d been talking behind my back.
“They were saying I wasn’t going to win and that I was really, really bad at singing.”
Later, at high school, Mikayla developed an eating disorder.
“I did go through a lot of binge stages, a lot of purge stages, a lot of over-exercising, just not eating properly at all,” she recalls.
“It got to the point where Mum had to take me to the hospital because I couldn’t make a 10-minute walk to school. It was very bad.”
Mikayla hopes to show her true talent.
The teenager then sought help from doctors and psychologists.
“I wanted to be happy like everyone else,” she says. “I wanted to be able to eat food and just enjoy it.”
Now, with her troubled school years behind her, Mikayla says she’s in “the best place I’ve been in a very long time”.
And both her parents are incredibly supportive of her appearing on The Voice.
“I haven’t seen my dad properly since I was 11,” she adds. “I just started seeing him again because I wanted to amend things.”
The shy schoolgirl is passionate about helping other kids who are being bullied. She even has a message for her own school bullies.
“I have talent,” she declares. “I know that I can get very far in my life, and I can do whatever I want to do. No amount of negative words is going to stop me from seeking my happiness.”
