We were lucky to catch up with Amanda Rowe recently and have shared our conversation below.

Amanda, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

The most meaningful project I’ve worked on is a book for chronically ill people. My daughter has an aggressive disease, and we’ve spent an inordinate amount of time at the hospital and other outpatient appointments. It’s been stressful, exhausting, and expensive. My daughter has suffered intensely for years battling her health issues, yet she is a creative, loving, and positive person. She’s been through so much; instead of making her bitter and angry, it’s given her the desire to help others. It’s given her a passion for life and an appreciation for every day she’s not in the hospital. She doesn’t sweat the small stuff or take a happy moment for granted. I am in awe of her strength and resilience. But I know it hasn’t been easy for her, and millions of people like her struggle daily with pain and medical challenges. I want to give them something to make them feel seen and valued. I want to tell them how incredible and inspiring they are, so I wrote a book for them. I hope this book will encourage my daughter and patients like her all over the world. People who struggle with chronic illness have so much stolen from them – time, energy, fun, plans, sleep – I want to give them something that they can return to anytime they feel down. I hope it brings them comfort.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I have been writing since I was a child, but it wasn’t until I was in my twenties that I started my freelance writing career. My children were small then, and I was a stay-at-home mother. I wrote while they slept – poems, slogans, greeting cards and essays. I wrote many nonfiction articles that I sold to websites under a pseudonym. I did that for a few years, and then my daughter became ill, and I put the writing on hold. After my divorce, when my daughter’s health stabilized, I had more free time, so I started writing again. I was sad, still reeling from the divorce, and adjusting to my children being with their father half the time. I missed the way it was when they were little, and we were always together. I wanted my children to know how deeply they were loved and what our time together meant to me. So one lonely day, I wrote them a poem. That poem became my first children’s book – If There Never Was a You.

I’ve gotten messages from so many mothers and other caregivers saying the words of that book capture precisely how they feel about the little ones in their lives. Now that book is traveling worldwide, making children feel loved and cherished.

What I want people to take away from this story is that pain can lead to purpose. Some of my best pieces were written when I felt my lowest – when I was struggling with loneliness, depression, grief, or discouragement. Writing the truth about our challenges opens the door for us to connect with others who are suffering and make them feel less alone. It’s also therapeutic. I often don’t know how I feel about something until I write about it and go back and read it later. Writing through emotions helps me process them and in sharing that work I hope to encourage others to persist even when life is hard. Because life is hard.

When I read, I’m looking for emotional honesty. I want the whole truth. Tell me about your best day. Tell me about your worst day. I want to laugh with you. I want to cry with you. I want to celebrate with you. I want to go with you to the mountaintop and the valley. I want to get a glimpse of what it is like to be you. That’s what I want to read, and that’s what I aspire to write. I’m not there yet, but I’m working toward it. Being that vulnerable takes a lot of courage. I’m not always brave enough, but I’m trying to be.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

My first reaction to this question was to tell you how being an author requires resilience because writing involves so much rejection. That is true, but this is an opportunity to be brave, so I will dig deeper.

In 2019 I was thriving. My first book had come out, and I went on a book tour to promote it. I had so much fun traveling and meeting readers, librarians, and booksellers. The book was doing well. My family was healthy. I was busy but happy. Fast forward to 2020. The pandemic hits. All my book events are canceled. Book sales come to a halt. Publicity comes to a halt. The momentum I had worked so hard to build in my writing career vanishes. My daughter’s health has deteriorated; she’s on immunosuppressant drugs. This virus that no one fully understands is killing people, and I’m terrified for her. My job has become fully remote, and we are in lockdown to protect my daughter. So now I’ve gone from working in an office, traveling to promote my book, and meeting readers every weekend to total isolation. I wasn’t even food shopping; I was having my groceries delivered. I became depressed.

I’ve struggled with depression all my life; it comes and goes. But it hit me hard in 2020. The stress of trying to protect my children, hold down a job, and not lose everything I’d worked so hard for in my writing career during a pandemic was a lot. Then my 29-year-old brother died by suicide.

At that point, any attempts I had made at socialization ceased; I retreated from the world. When I’m in pain, I withdraw into myself. I was dealing with so many things including shock, denial, anger and guilt. I was devastated, as was my entire family. We were each lost in our grief but trying to help each other. It was one of the darkest times of my life. And then, just when I thought things could not get worse, my daughter had a major health crisis. I spent the next year rushing her to the emergency room on a near-weekly basis for life-saving medical treatments. She was frequently admitted and averaging about a week a month as an inpatient at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. There were so many treatments, tests, and appointments – they were trying desperately to stabilize her, but they could not. They decided she needed surgery, so in May of 2022, she had her second invasive surgery. It was long and complex, and the recovery was a nightmare. She had complications, and we had to keep returning to the hospital. She continued to have ER visits and hospital admissions and required constant monitoring over the next several months. I took a three-month leave from my job to care for her. She had to resign from her job (that she loved) because she was not well enough to return. Again, this was utterly devastating.

To say the last three years have been hard is like saying the ocean is damp. It’s been brutal. When I look back, I don’t know how we survived it but by the grace of God and the support of some wonderful family and friends. I stopped writing for a while and considered giving it up for good. Just waving the white flag and saying life is too hard – I have no energy left to fight for my dreams. I’m too tired, too overwhelmed. I can’t help anyone else because I’m drowning myself. But here I am, back at it.

I am slowly rejoining the world but not as who I used to be. These last few years have changed me. They have given me more profound gratitude for my health, loved ones, and every moment spent with them.

My daughter’s health challenges persist, grief persists, and I still struggle with my mental health sometimes. I’m trying to find happiness again. But writing has been a gift. Connecting with readers again has brought joy into my life. Resuming my writing career has given me hope that perhaps my story can help others. I feel a sense of purpose now, and for me purpose is the antithesis of depression. So instead of looking inward at my sadness, I’m looking outward and asking, how can these experiences help me be of service to someone else?

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

My children are always my greatest inspiration. I keep striving for them. I want them to be proud of me. I want to teach them by example not to settle for survival but to live a life of purpose and adventure. I want to support their dreams and have enough money to give them a home they love, travel with them, and make memories that will carry us through the tough times. During the last few years, we had to cancel several family vacations that we had planned. When my daughter began to regain her strength, we decided it was time to make some memories outside of the hospital. I asked her where she wanted to go, and she said Disney World, so we went.

I am so thankful we took that trip; now I remember why they call Disney the most magical place on earth. To be immersed in a fantasy world where we rode fun rides all day, ate delicious food, and watched fireworks at night was a gift. The joy and wonder we felt was exactly what we needed after all the stress and heartbreak we’ve endured the past few years. Seeing my daughter smile and recapture some of the childhood that she lost was worth every penny. I want more moments like that.

But writing is about more than income; my goal is to use my words and platform to encourage, comfort, and inspire people. Hopefully, I can entertain them in the process. But I want to take the struggles that I’ve faced and the pain I’ve experienced and share them so that others who are hurting feel less alone. I want to help struggling single moms because I am a struggling single mom. I want to help chronically ill people and their caregivers because I am the caregiver to a chronically ill person. I want to help suicide survivors because I am surviving the suicide of a loved one. I could go on, but the point is I’m constantly asking myself what lessons I can learn from this season and how I can share them with others who are going through something similar. Because I don’t want my pain to be wasted, and I don’t want it to make me bitter. I want it to make me empathetic. I want to reach out to others who are hurting and help them. So, I will endeavor to write words that offer value and hope and try to be brave and tell the truth.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://amandarowewrites.squarespace.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amandarowewrites/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/amandarowewrites

Image Credits
Ben Rowe