When she was contemplating suicide after her life seemed like it would forever be engulfed by ugly twists and turns of fate, she may not have been wary that at one point, she would come to be a tower of hope and inspiration among many people.
Kikuyu gospel musician Phyllis Mbuthia well-known for her hit song 'Githe Tiwe Ngai' (Are you not the one God), reveals that her life took a downward trajectory after completing primary school where she scored 397/500 marks in KCPE but her family's humble background could not allow her to join the school she was admitted to.
As a result, the Bahati-born artist says she had to settle for a local academy after a family friend volunteered to pay her school fees.
"The problem with that school is that many of my classmates had scored below average in KCPE and as a result, I was always feeling misplaced. I, however, did not want to show or tell my sponsor that I did not like the school and that I was better off at home than be in such a school," Mbuthia tells Inooro FM's Jeff Kuria in a recent interview.
She adds: "Therefore, I had to devise ways on how I would get expelled from that school which eventually happened after I had decided to pursue a path of rebelliousness. I was expelled while in Form One which gave me a sigh of relief."
Mbuthia who has also done two popular 'collabos', 'Muheani' (Giver) and 'Muoyo' (Life), with Sammy Irungu and Jimmy Gait respectively, would immediately after expulsion from school move to Lanet in Nakuru where she would work as a house girl for 10 months.
All this time, she says, her ultimate goal was to save enough money to enable her to attend a school that matched her high KCPE score which came to materialize after her employer in Lanet noted 'my smartness upstairs' and volunteered to pay for her fees at a 'good' school in Nakuru Town.
However, while studying at this school, things would not get any much better as problems kept on cropping up one after another, which made her reach a point of contemplating suicide while in Form Three 'because I felt more of a destitute than anything else'.
Nonetheless, the mother of two adds, her apparently troubled life only came to take a positive turn after she decided to embrace 'positive energy' which she has made her daily companion up to this date and the rest, as they say, is history.