"Teach Me / Навчи мене"
Most of my songs are about surviving the storm. This one is about turning around inside it — and asking it to teach me.
Teach Me — Навчи мене — is the sister to I Don't Operate In Fear. Same season, same cold. There was a stretch of my life where a decision about me was being made by people who had already made up their minds — where the paperwork of it moved in rooms I wasn't in, and a version of me got written down that I didn't recognize. I'll keep the specifics where they belong. But the feeling is exactly here, in the first verse, and I didn't have to reach for it:
A stack of papers signed in the dark,
They took the name and they left the mark.
The table is rigged, the verdict is in,
They paint a saint with the brush of a sin.
For a long time my honest reflex to that was to disappear. To make myself small, lock the shame outside, and wait it out in the dark where no one could get a clean look at me. The song names that instinct out loud — and then it does the opposite:
I used to look for a place to hide,
To lock the cold and the shame outside.
But I square my shoulders, I turn the key,
I look at the storm and I say: teach me.
That two-word turn — teach me — is the whole song, and it took me a long time to earn it. It's the difference between asking why is this happening to me and asking what is this here to teach me. Not because the second question is nicer. Because it's the only one that gives you anything back. I stopped treating what I was going through as a punishment and started treating it as a curriculum. Hard, unwanted, unfair — and still, somehow, a curriculum. That's the reframe I'd stake the whole song on: suffering as teacher, not punishment.
The chorus doesn't ask for rescue. It asks for the capacity to hold the weight without dropping it and without being crushed by it:
Teach me!
Which part of the dark is afraid to speak?
Teach me!
I'm standing right here where the shadows meet.
… I won't run from the weight of the stone —
teach me to carry it home.
Carrying it home is the whole ask. Not putting the stone down — I'd stopped believing that was on offer. Just learning to walk with it, in the direction of somewhere that's mine. In the Ukrainian version of the song that line reaches even further back: the stone gets carried not just home, but through the generations — because it was never only my stone to begin with. Some of that weight came down a long line of women before me, and this is the first generation that gets to name it out loud.
The part of this song I'm proudest of is that it refuses to pick a side between the dark and the light. When something is being done to you, there's enormous pressure to collapse into one of two lies — either everything is fine, I'm all light, I've transcended it, or everything is ruined, I'm all dark now. I didn't want either. I wanted to stand exactly on the seam and let both be true at once:
A house can burn while the garden grows tall.
I am the ruins, I am the wall.
… The dark and the light are both looking at me.
Then the bridge does the thing I most needed to believe. It pulls all the way back — out past the paperwork, past this one cruel season, past even this one life — and reframes the entire human experience as something an old soul signed up to learn:
We didn't start in the dust of this earth,
We didn't come here to prove our worth.
Just an ancient soul in a heavy coat,
learning the gravity, learning the throat —
learning to bleed, learning to walk,
learning the human words when we talk.
That's the quiet center of everything I make. We are not here to be graded. We didn't come to prove we're worthy. We came — old, luminous, briefly wearing a heavy coat of a body — to learn the whole range of it, including the grief. And you don't do that by numbing half of it off:
The grief is a river, the joy is a flood.
I'm keeping them both alive in my blood.
So the song ends the way the real thing ends — not with the weather clearing, because it hadn't. It ends with me choosing to keep moving anyway, with the rain still on my skin, calling the storm my teacher on the way out:
The storm is still moving,
the ground is still wet,
but I am walking.
Teach me.
I didn't write this to tell you the hard thing was secretly good. It wasn't. Some of it was just cruel, and I won't pretend otherwise. What I'm telling you is narrower and truer: you get to decide what you let it make of you. You can let it teach you to carry weight, to hold two states without splitting, to walk while it's still raining. Навчи мене. Teach me. It already is — and I'm still walking.