As a queer skater girl making her debut in the music industry, girlboy J’s style of pop-punk is raw, honest and personal.
Using music as a platform for shattering the stigma around mental health struggles, she launches her single ‘Not Real, Not Here’, inspired by her battle with PTSD.
“The chorus talks about my experience with dissociation, apathy and PTSD. There were so many periods of my life where I would literally say to people ‘I’m not a real person anymore,’ and everyone thought I was being emo or poetic, but I actually didn’t know how else to phrase what I was going through…. Later when I got diagnosed with PTSD, I found out that it is very common for people with it to articulate that they don’t feel real, or that they have this inexplicable feeling that they aren’t living a normal life. It’s like no matter how hard you go through the motions and check off the boxes everyone else is checking off, there is some sort of disconnect – you can’t get back to the effortlessness of existing, you just have to fake it.”