Sarah Rowan spent 38 years hiding who she really was in a strict Christian environment. Trauma stored in her body as rheumatoid arthritis, a marriage that wasn’t hers, and a life on autopilot. Here is how she took back the steering wheel, rebuilt through art, and discovered that creativity and unconditional love are paths to healing.
Sarah Rowan grew up in South Carolina’s Bible Belt with a loving family and an unspoken rule: you can be anything except gay. For nearly four decades, she buried her identity under perfectionism, faith, and achievement. By 30, her body held so much unprocessed trauma that she developed debilitating rheumatoid arthritis and could barely walk. She stayed in a 12-year marriage that was not hers, gave the steering wheel of her life to a higher power, and sat screaming in the backseat.
At 38, she could no longer hide. She left with $24 and two suitcases and moved to Australia.
What Sarah discovered there changed everything. A flat tyre led to a stranger who became a TV producer. Speed painting taught her that art communicates across every barrier, language, age, religion, politics, location, belief systems. A woman named Liz loved her without conditions, without a list of things to fix. And she learned that the castle we are born with holds 1000 rooms, each one a gift we close as we grow up, gifts we can reopen at any point in our lives.
Today Sarah runs a thriving art and speaking practice, teaches others that creativity is medicine, and holds her beliefs lightly, like potato chips. She and Liz got matching kintsugi tattoos after a year of saying ‘I kintsugi you’ instead of ‘I love you’ because they couldn’t yet say it without fear. Now they can. Her story is about the gold in the brokenness, the power of self-authorship, and what healing looks like when you finally give yourself permission to live.
🕒 CHAPTERS:
00:00 Holding beliefs like potato chips
03:23 Drawing stick figures in Brazil
07:37 The gold in all that brokenness
12:38 In the backseat of her own life
17:49 The castle with 1000 rooms
21:00 The flat tire that changed everything
29:30 Trauma as inflammation
35:38 Trauma leaves the body through creation
40:25 What unconditional love actually means
43:08 What unconditional love taught her
47:34 Systems, time, and the fire horse
50:16 Finding Sarah Rowan
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ABOUT KINTSUGI HEROES
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Welcome.
We’re glad you found your way here.
Kintsugi Heroes was created from a simple belief: every person has a story worth sharing, and sometimes the story we need to hear arrives exactly when we need it most.
Our name comes from the Japanese art of Kintsugi, where broken pottery is repaired with gold. Rather than hiding the cracks, they are honoured as part of the object’s history. We believe people are much the same. The experiences that challenge us, break us, shape us, and help us grow are often the very things that connect us to one another.
This channel is home to honest conversations about resilience, hope, grief, recovery, courage, love, and what it means to keep moving forward when life doesn’t go to plan.
Here you’ll find six podcast series, each sharing stories through a different lens:
• Kintsugi Heroes, hosted by John Milham
• Animals & Us, hosted by Natalie Stockdale
• Grit Diaries: From Grit to Grace, hosted by Simone Allan and Maryan Bova
• From There to Here, hosted by Emma Bellamy-Dodd
• Golden Threads: Stories of Disability & Resilience
• Pride in Stories, hosted by John Dwyer
Every story shared here is offered with the hope that it helps someone feel a little less alone. A little more understood. A little more connected.
Whether you’re navigating a difficult season, supporting someone you love, or simply looking for meaningful conversations, you’re welcome here.
New episodes are released fortnightly across our series.
If you’d like to help us keep these stories freely available to everyone, you can support our work here: https://www.kintsugiheroes.com.au/donate
Thank you for being part of this community.
We help people tell the stories they need to share so others can discover the story they need to hear.
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