The first song — Stay. Hold on. Bloom. / Не Зникай. Стій. Цвіти.
I'm an introverted person. For most of my life the things that mattered most stayed inside me — I never had an easy way to say them out loud. Music turned out to be that way. It's how I speak now, how I tell what's actually happening to me. And I'm not quiet about it anymore. I want it said.
So here's how this one came to be.
Every year I make a birthday video for my mom. This year, some people I met introduced me to making music and video with AI — and I fell for it instantly. It felt like infinite possibility: any sound I could imagine, any image, without the long shooting days a clip used to take. Mom's video turned out beautiful. People loved it. I didn't want to stop.
Around that same time, a lot was happening in my life around immigration — the kind of uncertainty that sits on your chest and won't move. So I wrote a song about it. That was the first one. And somewhere in the making of it I thought: if even one Ukrainian woman hears this and feels a little less alone on a hard day, then it's done exactly what I needed it to do. That was the whole mission. It still is.
The title is three quiet commands: stay, hold on, bloom. To hold on is to stay on your feet in your own life — to not move yourself out before anyone makes you go. But to bloom is the one that still undoes me: open anyway, be in full color anyway, while you still don't know whether you get to keep the ground you're standing on. And notice how it ends — not stay, but let us stay; let's bloom. By the final chorus it had stopped being a song only to myself.
I wrote it in two languages because I live in two at once — one carries the exact weight of it for the people who'll know what I mean without explanation, the other opens the same door for anyone who has ever waited on an answer that wasn't theirs to give. Not a translation; two voices for one truth.
Here's the thing I learned writing it: blooming is not the same as winning. To bloom is just to keep being yourself, out loud, in color — while you're still afraid. That's the most defiant thing I know. And the heart of it is the refusal to disappear, because disappearing was the real temptation: to go quiet, to make myself small enough not to be noticed. The song refuses that. It says be more visible, not less. Bloom louder.
I'll be honest about how it ends, because honesty is the whole point: I made this before the answer came. It doesn't promise rescue. It promises something better — that I will not vanish while I wait.
This is the first station of a longer road, and it matters that it's first. The songs that came after learned the opposite, harder lesson — how to open my hands and let things go. But you can't let go of something you never dared to hold. First you stay. First you refuse to disappear. Only then do you earn the rest. After this one, I just kept going — writing the things that happen to me, the way an introvert finally gets to speak. This is where all of it begins.
And if you're reading this in the middle of your own waiting — an answer that isn't yours to give, a ground you're not sure you get to keep — then it found you exactly right. Don't disappear. Stay. Hold on. Bloom.