There is something quietly powerful about refusing to wait for permission. For Bulgarian artist Petya, creativity has never fit neatly into one category. She is a writer, lyricist and now musician, moving between words, ideas and sound while building a creative practice alongside her full-time career. She has written more than 30 song lyrics, published a book, and recently released SOMADAYLESS, a song born from an idea and a word of her own making.

What makes Petya’s story particularly interesting is not simply the number of things she creates, but the way she has found her way into each of them. Without the traditional pathways, industry connections or formal music background one might expect, she chose to explore what was possible with the tools available to her, including generative AI. Her journey raises a bigger question for anyone who has ever wondered whether they are “qualified” to make something: what happens when you stop waiting for someone to give you permission to begin?

You’ve written more than 30 song lyrics, published a book, and now released a song, while also working full-time in a completely different field. Where do you think your instinct to create comes from, and has that always been a part of you?

Since I was a child, I have believed that words are one of the greatest powers we have. With words, we can open a door in someone’s life. Or close it before they have even found the courage to knock.

We can give direction, knowledge, hope. We can help. And we can hurt someone so deeply that years later, they still remember the exact sentence.

In court, we defend ourselves with words and evidence. Our prayers are words and faith. Love begins with words too — and, if it is real, continues through actions. And when someone leaves this world, once again we search for words.

The last ones. The ones we use to say goodbye. Maybe that is why, to me, words and time are the two most valuable resources we have.

Both run out. Both can be wasted. And neither can ever be fully taken back once it has been given.

The strange thing is that for many years, I never thought of what I was doing as “creativity.” I never sat down thinking, now I am going to be a creator. I didn’t see myself that way.

I simply wrote. When something moved me, I wrote. When something made me angry, I wrote. When I couldn’t say something out loud, I wrote that too. It was so natural to me that I never felt the need to give it a name. Only later did I understand that perhaps this is exactly what creativity means to me. Not a profession. Not a title. Not permission that somebody else has to give you.It is the way something inside you refuses to remain unsaid.

You said you eventually had to stop waiting for someone else’s process to make room for yours. What did “waiting for permission” look like for you, and when did you realise you were ready to stop doing it?

It was deeply emotional because I genuinely believed in those lyrics. I didn’t simply believe they were good. In my head, they already had lives of their own.

I imagined one of them playing during someone’s celebration. Another being there for someone during a difficult moment. Another becoming attached to a beautiful memory that somebody would return to years later.

There were lyrics I wrote while almost hearing the voice of a particular artist singing them. I was convinced that if they reached the right person, they could become incredible songs.

So I started sending them out. That was when I realised that something being completely clear in my mind did not necessarily mean the same thing to the person on the other side.

One person told me, ‘The lyrics are incredible, but our process works the other way around — first we create the music, then the lyrics are written.’

Another said, ‘It’s great, but it isn’t the direction we’re taking right now.’ A third never replied at all. A fourth loved the lyrics and said they would keep them in mind for the future.

And the future is a very convenient place. We can leave almost anything there that we are not ready to do today. I don’t believe any of those people owed me a yes. And today I understand their answers much better. The music industry simply did not work the way I had imagined it did.

But after enough ‘not now’, ‘not this way’, ‘maybe someday’, and sometimes simply silence, I started asking myself a different question:

How long am I willing to let my own words wait? And I no longer liked the answer. That was when I understood something very simple.

Nobody was actually stopping me from creating. I was simply waiting for somebody else to open the door. So I decided to look for another entrance.

SOMADAYLESS started with a word you created yourself. Can you tell us about that word and the idea behind the song? What did you want people to feel or think about when they heard it?

SOMADAYLESS came from a very simple and slightly painful thought — all those days that keep passing while we live with the feeling that we still have so many of them left.

So many days less.

At some point, those four words simply became one: SOMADAYLESS. And somehow, that one word said exactly what I wanted to say.

I have lost many people close to me. People in my family. People I loved. I have been to more funerals than weddings.

Unfortunately, I learned from a very young age what it means for someone to be here — and then not to be.

But loss does not always begin with death. Sometimes the person is still here, but you have stopped calling each other. You have grown apart. Something important has been left unsaid between you. And you keep thinking there will be another moment to say it.

Later. Someday. When we have more time. Except none of us knows how many ‘somedays’ we have left. We make plans as though time belongs to us.It doesn’t. It moves painfully fast, and it does not wait until we are ready.

That is why SOMADAYLESS is not a song about death. For me, it is exactly the opposite. It is a song about the time in which we are still here.

I wanted to remind myself first, and then anyone who hears the song, that we do not have forever. If you love someone, tell them. If you miss someone, call them.

If there are words you are carrying inside you, don’t be so certain that tomorrow will be a better day to say them. Because sometimes the words we postpone until ‘someday’ are exactly the words someone needs today.

You used generative AI to turn something that already existed in your head and on paper into music. What was that experience like for you as a creator, particularly around questions of authorship and ownership?

The biggest misconception would be to imagine that I wrote one prompt, pressed a button, and SOMADAYLESS came out the other side. It was a lot of work.

First, I had to learn how to use tools I had never used before. I generated, listened, rejected, changed, assembled, and started again. I made decisions about the sound, the structure, and the way I wanted the lyrics to be felt.

But to me, the song was never just an audio file. I had to build an entire world around it.

The name SOMADAYLESS, the lyrics, and the concept were already mine. From there, I created the digital identity of P.Peeva, the visual language of the project, the cover, the way I wanted it to be presented, the distribution, and the promotion.

Then another kind of work began — person by person, radio station by radio station, platform by platform — trying to find a way for this song to actually reach someone.

I didn’t have a team doing those things for me. So for me, AI did not take authorship away from me. It gave me access to a part of the process I previously had no access to.

I cannot sing SOMADAYLESS the way I hear it. I cannot sit behind every instrument myself and produce the recording that exists in my head.

But I know what I want to say. And I know when what I am hearing is not it. That distinction matters to me.

When it comes to ownership, I approached it as seriously as every other part of the project. I used paid versions of the generative tools with applicable commercial-use rights and followed the necessary procedures for distribution, registration, and documentation of the project.

To me, technology was not the author of the idea. It was the way the idea finally found a sound.

There’s a lot of anxiety around AI and creativity right now. What do you think people misunderstand about the relationship between AI and human creativity, especially when the human already has a clear idea, voice or story they want to express?

I think we sometimes confuse two very different things: the technical ability to create something and the reason for creating it.

AI can generate a song. It can generate an image, a text, or a video. Tomorrow, it will probably be able to do all of those things even better. But that does not mean it has something to say. For me, human creativity begins long before the tool.

It begins with something you have lived through. Something you noticed. Something that hurts you, angers you, excites you, or simply refuses to leave you alone.Then comes the decision of what to do with it.

AI did not experience the losses that SOMADAYLESS came from. It did not invent the word. It did not decide what I wanted that word to mean. It did not feel the need to tell somebody: don’t wait too long.All of that existed before the technology.

At the same time, I don’t think we should automatically call everything produced with AI ‘creativity’ simply because there is a human somewhere behind it.

The tool can make creation much more accessible. That is wonderful. But it can also make the production of content almost infinite.

And when that happens, I think the human role becomes more important, not less.

What do you choose? What do you reject? What do you stand behind? Why does this particular idea need to exist? And do you actually have something you want to say? I don’t think the question of the future will simply be, ‘Did you use AI?’ The more interesting question will be: ‘What did you bring that the machine could not?’ For me, the answer is: the reason.

You don’t describe yourself as belonging to just one creative medium. How do you think about your creative identity now, and do you think creators still feel pressured to choose a lane? 

To me, the idea that a person should have only one role is illogical. None of us is only one thing in life.

Every day, we solve different problems, perform different tasks, and step into different roles. We can be professionals in one field while having knowledge, ability, and passion in something entirely different. Nobody says to someone who speaks five languages, ‘Choose one. The others make you less authentic. ’Quite the opposite.

We understand that every additional language expands their world. I don’t see why creativity should be any different. To me, writing is one language. Music is another. Visual storytelling is a third.

Sometimes an idea wants to become a text. Another wants to become a song. A third may be something I have not yet discovered the form for.I don’t want to decide the form before I understand the idea.

And I don’t feel the need to fit myself into one word simply to make myself easier to define.

Perhaps for a long time we have treated creative identity like a profession: writer, musician, artist, filmmaker. I increasingly see it as a language system. The more ways you have to express an idea, the greater the chance that you will find the right one.

What has being a writer taught you that you’ve carried into music, and what has music taught you about writing or creating?

Writing taught me not to underestimate a word.

Not to put it into a sentence simply because it sounds beautiful. To ask why it is there and what will remain of it after someone closes the page. I carried that into music.

When I started writing songs, the lyrics could never be something that simply filled the space between the melody and the chorus. I wanted there to be a reason for every word to be said.

But music taught me something that writing had never taught me in quite the same way. Words have sound. On a page, you can go back. Read the sentence again. Stop. Think. A song doesn’t wait for you. The word has to reach you in the second you hear it.

I began to understand how much rhythm matters. The pause. Repetition. One syllable more or one syllable less. Sometimes a sentence that looks beautiful on the page simply does not want to be sung.

And sometimes three simple words, placed exactly where they belong, can carry the weight of an entire paragraph. Music also taught me to cut. That was probably the hardest part.

When you love words, your natural instinct is to add more. Music sometimes demands the opposite — to remove everything standing between the person and the feeling.

And perhaps the most interesting thing is that I no longer hear what I write in the same way. When I write now, I have started to feel the silence between the words. And sometimes that is where the most important thing is.

You’ve built this creative life alongside a full-time career. What has that balance actually looked like behind the scenes, and what have you had to learn about making space for your creativity?

Balance is a very beautiful word for something that, in reality, rarely looks balanced.

During the day, I am one hundred percent committed to my professional work. Outside of that, I volunteer for a purpose-driven organisation, where I create written content, messages, materials, presentations — essentially everything that passes through words.

I have a family. I have friends. And I want to be genuinely present in their lives too.

And then night comes. Very often, that is when I write. Ever since I was little, I have wished there were more than 24 hours in a day. They have always seemed insufficient to me.

Unfortunately, it turns out that Elon Musk and I have been given exactly the same number. So there goes that excuse.

The truth is that sometimes I take those hours from my sleep and rest. I don’t necessarily think that is a good model, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend it as a formula for success.

It is simply the honest answer to what things look like behind the scenes for me right now. I haven’t discovered a magical way to ‘have time.’

I have learned to fight for it. When there is a good result, it energises me and gives back a huge part of what I have put into it.

And when the result doesn’t come, the fuel is something else – my refusal to abandon something simply because it hasn’t worked yet. But my strongest motivation is my family. Because ambition can take you a very long way, but in the end, you also need to know who you want to get there for.

For women who have an idea or creative ambition but feel they don’t have the “right” background, training, connections or permission to pursue it, what would you want them to hear from your experience?

I don’t think I have achieved some extraordinary level of success that gives me the right to tell other women how they should pursue their dreams. I am still on the road myself, and I have no idea where it will take me.

But I can say what I have learned from my own experience so far.

I am a woman from Pleven — a city in a small Eastern European country that a huge part of the world has never heard of.

I don’t have a formal music education. I had no connections in the music industry. I didn’t have a team to introduce me to it or somebody I could call and ask to open the right door for me.

And yet I managed to turn one of my lyrics into a real, released music project that is reaching people and places around the world that I had no access to just a few months ago.

I don’t know whether that will lead to great success. And that is precisely the point. Starting does not require you to know the ending.

Dozens of things I have tried in my life have not worked out the way I wanted them to. Some never happened at all. That has not stopped me from trying the next thing.

So I would never tell another woman, ‘Do what I did.’ I can only tell her what my own experience has shown me: Not having the right connections, education or background can make the road considerably harder. It can make it slower. It can mean teaching yourself things that other people have entire teams to handle.

But you don’t have to turn what you lack into evidence that you shouldn’t try. I don’t know where I will end up. But at least I will no longer have to wonder what might have happened if I had tried.

If you look at the version of yourself who had written those first 30 lyrics but hadn’t released anything yet, what would you tell her now?

You know, I would go back even further.

Some time ago, I took part in a psychological exercise. I don’t remember whether the person leading it was a psychologist or a coach, but the exercise stayed with me.

We were asked to close our eyes and mentally return to a specific moment from childhood. To see it exactly as we remembered it — the place, the people, our family, what was happening. But we were supposed to return there as the people we are today. To stand to the side and watch.

Then we were asked to take our younger self by the hand and walk together. To keep walking until we felt ready to let go of that little hand.

And before letting go, to tell that child everything we know today that they could not possibly have known then.

To laugh together if we needed to laugh. To cry if we needed to cry. To tell them what we were proud of. To warn them. To say whatever we had come back to say.

I went back to a seven-year-old girl. I had climbed onto the kitchen chairs and was performing a concert for my family. I was singing very expressively in English. Except I didn’t speak English. I was making up the words. Probably nobody but me understood what I was singing, but apparently, I did.

Today, it feels almost unbelievable that so many years later, I am once again creating words of my own to express things that the existing ones sometimes aren’t enough to say.

So I wouldn’t go back to the woman with thirty written lyrics. I would go back to that seven-year-old girl standing on the kitchen chairs. And this time, I would have something to tell her.

First, I would apologise. Because it took me far too many years to understand that what she was doing so naturally back then was not simply a childhood game that we were supposed to leave somewhere along the road to growing up. It was part of her. Part of me. And I am sorry that I postponed her dream for so long. Then I would tell her: ‘I don’t know how far we’re going to get. But we’ve started.’ And then I would let go of her hand.