- POPSUGAR Australia
- Celebrity
- Hearing Polly ‘PJ’ Harding on Radio, You’d Never Know She’s Faced Her Toughest Year Yet
Hearing Polly ‘PJ’ Harding on Radio, You’d Never Know She’s Faced Her Toughest Year Yet
by
Anita Anabel
Instagram @PJDeejay
Listening to Polly “PJ” Harding on KIISFM’s Jase and PJ breakfast show, you’d never know the year she’s had. Between the global pandemic, the loss of her father in September 2019 and being away from her New Zealand based family and fiancé, Harding has just had to keep on going.
“I think I just knew I had to get up and do the show every morning,” she told POPSUGAR Australia.
“I think in a time where it was so pressing [due to COVID-19], there was motivation to be there for people tuning into the show. Because I couldn’t go any further, I had to take it for what it was. Try and get through it as best I can.”
For Harding who currently lives in Melbourne, having a routine has been incredibly important for both her mental health and overall wellbeing during the state’s various lockdowns.
“I tried to meditate more and more every day and made sure I was doing a workout at home. I got into cooking, and I just really tried to find joy in life,” she said.
Harding, 30, and her co-host Jase Hawkins, left their popular New Zealand radio show in 2017 to seek a brighter opportunity in Australia. Signing with the Australian Radio Network, the pair have held court over breakfast radio in Melbourne, with a national recap show airing around the country at night.
While a powerhouse team, being away from her family, friends and fiancé (know to the show’s audience as BJ) was starting to take its toll on Harding. So Hawkins and the team decided to send her back to New Zealand for a few months, setting her up remotely.
“It was such an ugly cry,” Harding recalls of the emotion she felt after she found out about their plans. “It was just pure joy. Pure Joy. Period.”
Making the move even more joyful was being reunited with her now fiancé who she hadn’t physically seen in over eight months. A short time later, he proposed and now engaged, PJ has a wedding to look forward to.
“Initially, I was like, ‘oh no, we should wait’ and now we’re like, ‘let’s just do it’,” she said. “My brother is in London and I wouldn’t want to do it without him being here, so realistically it probably won’t be until the earlier half of next year.”
During her time on Jase and PJ, fans have joined in on Harding’s relationship journey from first meeting to now, but she does reserve some of it for her and her fiancé.
“There’s a lot of stuff that goes on outside the show that I reserve for just us,” she said. “He’s a farmer and is really down to earth, so it’s good that he’s in a completely different world to me and he doesn’t get caught up.”
You can listen to PJ on KIISFM’s Jase and PJ breakfast show.