What happens to someone’s words when they get published?
If you work in the non profit sector, you have almost certainly sat with someone while they told you something true and difficult about their life.
You may have taken notes. Some of it might have gone into a report, or an evaluation, or a funding application, and maybe it’s been anonymised for privacy. And then, at some point, the report was finished and filed, and the story served its greater purpose.
But what happens with the person’s words afterwards?
Someone opened their heart and got vulnerable to say these words… they almost never get to keep them. Their story lives inside them and they’ve got to repeat it to keep their reality alive.
I think about this a great deal, because of what happened to my own account of myself.
I spent more than ten years in Costa Rica building a fine dining restaurant. I was number one on TripAdvisor in our province for six years running, and OpenTable named one of my dishes among twenty five in the world worth travelling for. Then in 2025 I woke up one morning banned from Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn on the same day. Articles about the restaurant disappeared from websites. My TripAdvisor position fell from first to around one hundred and fifty seven.
The restaurant sat deliberately away from the tourist areas, so it relied on people finding it online. Being removed from the internet made me and the restaurant unfindable. COVID was the worst year for restaurants, and in 2025, I took half the money that I had taken during COVID. As a result I got into debt and I was forced to come back to Europe. I spent a year trying to rebuild myself and re-entered into a system I had left at eighteen, including having to ask for food stamps.
Prior to that, I was a successful fine dining chef who had been invited to speak at Harvard about entrepreneurship and whose first book became required reading at the Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC.
So what happened?
For about 15 years, articles, podcasts and interviews were published about my work about once a month.
By the time I started my public journey as a trans woman during COVID, over 150 publications about my work existed on the internet. I was very confident my professional success would trump the potential social backlashes of being a trans woman.
Since my transition 5 years ago, I got 1 interview on a philosophy podcast, and I was asked to write 1 chapter for a book called “Men’s Work”. When friends asked if I get much hate, I laugh and remind them that once over the course of 2h, I received over 180 comments of hate telling me how I should die and go to hell. So I don’t even hear hate anymore, it’s just become part of the landscape, like rain that you just naturally avoid paying attention to otherwise it makes you miserable.
When I disappeared from the internet, the first pain was money because I had lost access to clients and work.
As I tried to rebuild my life, I realised something bigger had happened: the account of my own life was deleted.
So the work I do now is about giving people their own account back through music, a form they will actually use.
Clients say “”I don’t think I’ve ever felt so seen in my life ” (Lindsay), “it’s one of the most personal gifts Ihave ever received” (Megan) and “it makes me feel sane. It makes me feel like what I know and seem to believe about my own self is real” (Jamie).
I created the Sonic Rewrite methodology through which I interview someone for about an hour, then I compose and produce a 5 to 9 tracks album out of what they said.
Over ninety per cent of the words in the songs are literally theirs. I take their sentences apart and rebuild them to create a narrative that’s empowering no matter how difficult a situation someone has had to go through. And every album is created in a unique music style that’s a blend of what the client listened to as a teenager and what they listen to now as an adult. A full music album can hold a whole life rather than a single anecdote, creating a mirror for one’s ears and music that heals.
The reason it is music rather than a document is that a document, an image or any other format is that they require you to decide to read it, look at it or do it. Music does not. Music most often happens in the background of our lives as we go to the gym or hang out with friends.
People who have a Sonic Rewrite play their music while jogging, doing dishes or at 6:00 am as part of their morning routine. Amanda received her two albums in January and has played them for 1h 30 every day since and journals for an hour or two a week off the back of them.
Continuously for 7-months. That’s over 300 hours of focused attention.
Lindsay says she keeps hers in the car, and one afternoon while driving, a memory surfaced that she had not touched in twenty years and finally explained something she had never been able to work with as an adult. She was not in a session. She was running errands.
Jamie said “if someone listens to this, they know me. The things I actually care about people understanding about me are in them.”
What I do is not about creating music millions of people like, it’s about creating music that changes one person’s life. It’s music people use for healing rather than consume as passive entertainment.
The phrase I hear most often by people who listened to their Sonic Rewrite for the first time is “I have never felt so seen.”
What they are describing is not really the music. It is the experience of being listened to for an hour without being interrupted, and then being handed back their own language rather than somebody else’s summary of it.
I have made 39 of these now, of which 11 of them are for myself.
In November 2025, I made my first Sonic Rewrite for myself because my life had descended to hell. I had lost my business, my home, my family and my friends and past clients all acted like I had leprosy. I was at the lowest I had ever been, isolated in a country I left when I was 18 because I felt like I didn’t belong.
In May 2026, barely 4 months after arriving in Barcelona with my suitcase and 0 business contacts, an album I created for the multinational BNI, was played for 2 days at the RCDE Stadium in Barcelona for an event with over 1000 entrepreneurs.
As I listened every day to the story of my descent to hell be told to me as music in a way that empowered me, I rebuilt myself from the depth of depression to have created a business I’m passionate about because it changes people’s lives for the better.
When our stories get erased, we lose our identity. When we disappear from the records, our lives become invisible.
Which brings me back to the question I started with. If our work depends on lived experience, and if we are the only person who ever hears the full version, then we are holding something that currently has nowhere to go except disappearing slowly in our memory.
Every day we read and hear about the stories of politicians, business tycoons, and celebrities.
It’s easy to forget that our story matters. Your story matters because you matter. Let’s normalise being reminded that we matter.
Mercedes Noam Kostucki
30th September 2026
Please get in contact via my websites www.sonicrewrite.com and www.mercysmiracles.com