Jane Serena likes her podcasts just like she likes her photographs, raw and spontaneous. It was in 2015 that the 20-year-old's father gave her an iPhone and she ended up taking pictures of every detail that caught her attention. After her father passed away in 2016, she started a different kind of photography. "I would go up to people, start talking to them, get to know their story and capture their picture while they were being completely open and raw,” shares Jane. This gave her a wealth of stories. Coupled with the fact that someone who seemed as bright and successful as actor Sushant Singh Rajput could take to suicide, "Seriously, I wasn't able to sleep the entire night. I kept thinking, 'If he could go to the extreme, who am I?'," she says.
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These factors made her put out an IGTV post on Instagram about pain and its inevitability. "I also wrote a post about how to deal with the lockdown by being self-aware, knowing what's hurting you, enjoying small moments and so on. I was appreciated so much for it that I realised I have stories to share. That's how I started my own podcast, Stay Sane With Jane, on Spotify," says the student of Villa Marie College in Hyderabad.
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It was about a month back that Jane initiated the podcast and she already has about 1,000 people streaming it. "The idea is not to preach, I share what has worked for me. That's it," says Jane. In the context of JEE and NEET exams being conducted amidst COVID and lots of students having to make the difficult decision of switching streams, she spoke about the stress of choosing another stream and the anxiety that comes with it. And as someone who switched streams from Science to BBA, which is what she is pursuing now, it was a topic she related to. So, the Hyderabadi girl ensures that what she speaks she speaks from experience or from her heart.
Through this weekly podcast, Jane has covered topics like self-love, social media toxicity and has even shared a moving episode of her personal experience of dealing with mental breakdowns, and yet, never has her podcast gone over seven minutes. "I don't time it nor do I script it to the T, though I used to at the beginning. I don't want to be perfect, I am just going with the flow," says Jane. Wise words to live by, we say.
Titles of her episodes:
- Some boundaries set you free
- A better friend
- When you think you're a bad person
For more on her, check out instagram.com/janeserena9/
