Journey Back to Self:
Read the full narrative here!
For years, I lived two identities I couldn’t explain and often questioned. One was constantly moving: the traveler. The other was constantly building: the consultant.
The first took me to almost 100 countries. The second kept me in my career for more than 17 years. Every trip, every extra year, the same question followed me: ‘what is all of this for’?
I later understood that the question was never about the travel nor the career. It took hearing myself tell a different story altogether: my divorce story.
I was driving back from a fishing trip with my friend Yassine when he asked, “Sally, may I ask what’s behind your divorce? I know it’s been almost ten years”.
I said “yah sure, I am fully over it, I had done the therapy work I needed”. But as I answered, I heard myself reconstructing events, justifying, and going into details that no longer mattered. Somewhere between the road and the story, I realized: ten years later, I was still telling it like a wound!
I asked myself, is this how a healed woman tells her story? Where is the part that could help someone through what you went through?. I came to see that healing is not only in the mind and the heart. It is also in the throat: the voice we tell our stories with.
I began encountering the same phrase everywhere “Change your story, change your life”, almost as if the universe was speaking to me, but I haven’t found, or known, the “how.”
In 2018, on a trip to Montana, USA, I was talking to my friend Goozi and told her, “Everyone tells you to change your story, but no one tells you how.” She looked at me and said, “Maybe you’re the one who will help people actually change their stories”.
Asking myself how, a quieter voice answered: ‘Sally, you’re a consultant. You design frameworks. You create programs. You turn complexity into something people can actually use. You can do this!’.
And in that moment, the idea of Edit The Story was born.
I jumped on a plane and started working on the framework – ‘the how’ to the ‘change your story’ motto. Before offering it to anyone, I tested it on the hardest story I own: ‘Where is home’?
I am originally Palestinian, and I have never been to Palestine. For most of my life, I struggled to find a home in this world, especially as a traveler on the move. People made it harder when they kept asking, “What are you seeking? Don’t you feel ungrounded, tired, or lost?”.
Using my own framework, I let the traveler and the grounded woman integrate. I stopped chasing a forever definition of home and made peace with a “sense of home” instead, one I carry wherever I go. The facts hadn’t changed, but what they meant to me had. After that, I felt a stronger drive to own my life and to change the stories I wasn’t at peace with, one after another.
The business model took shape in Bali and kept evolving as I traveled, until I met my client in the Maldives and delivered the first one-to-one retreat in Dubai. That’s when it finally felt real.
Years later, walking in Tajikistan and playing in my head how the idea was born in Montana, the framework built in Cuba, the strategy designed in Bosnia, the partners met in Bali and UK, the client met in the Maldives, the proposal drafted in Iceland, and the first retreat delivered in Dubai, tears filled my eyes: all along, Edit The Story had been quietly taking shape inside my own. The traveler and the consultant in me were never two distinct women. Together, they shaped what – starting with my divorce – became Edit The Story.
My framework doesn’t change what happened; it changes what it means. It looks beyond labels of ‘divorce’ or ‘failure’ to explore who we are being invited to become and help us embody that new identity by reconnecting with the throat.
Every time I finish a client’s story, I find a little of myself in at least one line. Today, through Edit The Story, I find my way back to the 8 year old poet: writing, discovering, and editing again and again.
Sally Alrokh
