Meet Rosemary Simpson

We were lucky to catch up with Rosemary Simpson recently and have shared our conversation below.

Rosemary, so great to have you sharing your thoughts and wisdom with our readers and so let’s jump right into one of our favorite topics – empathy. We think a lack of empathy is at the heart of so many issues the world is struggling with and so our hope is to contribute to an environment that fosters the development of empathy. Along those lines, we’d love to hear your thoughts around where your empathy comes from?

Can I go deep?

I am an abuse survivor, not only that, but I moved my children almost 4 hours away from our hometown to flee from their father. So I am also a single mother due to their father not being safe to be around them.

I have empathy for anyone who is going through something traumatic but still wants to persevere. I have empathy for anyone who feels like their childhood trauma is holding them back. I have empathy for literally anyone because I have been through a lot, and I have seen a lot of things.

I come from a childhood of a two parent home, but still my mother was a single parent! My parents were married my whole childhood, but my mother was the only one that I remember ever doing anything remotely close to teaching or nurturing her children. My father was working, but he also had so many different addictions, including cheating on and abusing her, that he was never home and we were consistently being evicted or utilities being cut off because he was not taking care of business.

I was sexually abused by multiple different children, as a child. I grew up to be in an abusive marriage, where I was also sexually, physically and financially abused.

When I finally got the strength to leave him, I was in a relationship where I was emotionally, physically, financially and sexually abused as well. So I come From Abuse, I come from being treated less than I actually am! Yet I still persevere.

When I was a child, I clung to after school activities. I was in theater, orchestra and debate. I traveled all over doing tournaments, plays, college tours, you name it, I was there! I did not want to be home.

As an adult, I went to college for theater and I also went to college for Hair. Even through two abusive relationships that lasted altogether almost 11 years, I had multiple children and still continued to work! I never sat down.

Even when my creativity was suppressed, even when I had no self-esteem at all, because I was being told that I was fat and ugly, even when I had literally nothing to hold onto, I still held onto the fact that if I don’t do it, no one else will.

I have always protected and provided for the children in my family, so when I became a mother, that was a nonnegotiable for me. Having children gave me the empathy to continue to walk out situations, relationships, and even partnerships with people who might not be easy to talk to, but if there’s a common goal, we’re gonna reach that goal!

I have always been a go-getter, once something is on my mind, I stop at nothing until it is done. I wrote and published a book about my life and now I am in the process of trying to get that book in as many hands as I can! There are so many people who are still living with imposter syndrome, who are still living in a victim mindset, who still don’t think that they can make it out of what they are in!

I am ocular proof that you can make it out of anything and I will stop at nothing to continue to push my story out so that more people can see what God can do in your life.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

I am a small town woman with big city dreams. Born and raised in Wichita, KS, I overcame many obstacles to get to where I am today.

The purpose of The RosieXperience is to assist the masses in overcoming obstacles sent to destroy them by sharing my Xperience as a single mother and an abuse survivor, thus providing ocular proof, via social media platforms, that changing your MIND and growing closer to God, yields a positive change in your LIFE!

I am a licensed Master Stylist of over a decade, a Christian Poet and a social media influencer, residing in Blue Springs, MO, raising my children and nephew to break the generational curses sent to destroy their family.

You can find my recently published novel, Faith. Family. Freedom: The RosieXperience on the Barnes and Noble Website. My podcast can be found on Spotify/Apple Podcast and my presence on Tiktok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter under The RosieXperience!

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

Humility will be one of the first skills that I would advise everyone who is embarking on a journey of growth to have. If you are not humble, it is hard for you to receive the things that God has placed in the universe for you. You block your own blessings and you block connections with people who could put you in a better position if you feel like you already know everything!

Forgiveness would be the next thing that I definitely had to lock into in order to grow. Had I held onto animosity towards either of my parents, either of my exes who nearly killed me, or anyone from jobs, school, church ect who hurt me, then I would not be able to grow. Here’s the thing, my body has been taken advantage of since I was a child. Outside of that, I have been treated like I was less than because of my size as well! I have been treated in ways that would make some people just hate life in general! I had to choose forgiveness in order to grow to where I am growing right now. I say that in the present tense because I have not grown all the way yet, I am learning more and more every day that I need to grow more still, and I will never stop growing until the day that I die!

The last quality that I would say everyone needs to have would be faith. It was my faith that Jesus would protect me that got me out of terrible situations! It was my faith in Jesus that got me to a point where I was able to even charge my worth in my career field! It was by my faith in Jesus, I was able to stand up and do everything that I needed to do in my life and still take care of my children without Feeling inadequate in that area. Faith will get you far and I don’t care who or what you believe in. I know that the only truth, and the only light is Jesus Christ, and without him all things will eventually fail!

As we end our chat, is there a book you can leave people with that’s been meaningful to you and your development?

The book that has helped me grow the most would honestly be my own personal book.Faith. Family. Freedom: The RosieXperience.

When I wrote my book, I was in a very dark place! It had been on my heart to write a book ever since I moved to Kansas City in 2021, yet it was not until 2023 that I actually put the pen to paper.

I had given my life to God already and I had been walking in the faith for over a year. I was checking all of the boxes, I was doing everything right, the only thing I hadn’t done was fully surrender.

I did not even realize that was the case until one day, I got raped by someone that I thought was a friend. I didn’t look at it as rape at first, but after further reflection, I realized exactly what it was. I felt like I had did something wrong because as I stated, I was checking all the boxes in my Christian walk.

I was praying every single day, reading my Bible, every single day, going to sleep with the Bible playing in my ear, not listening to anything but gospel music, not drinking, or smoking, not having sex, not cussing! I literally was doing everything morally right, but I still felt alone.

There’s no way I was fully surrendered to God if I still felt alone. So after I got taken advantage of, I went to church that weekend and cried like a baby. Everything the pastor said, just hit my heart to the point that I literally could not keep my composure. There was a point in the sermon that the pastor looked straight at me and said “Trouble Don’t Last Always”, and then the worship team started to play that song overhead and it just made me bust out crying.

After service, I walked up to the pastor and told him what had happened in my life, and he told me to stand up and fight. He said “you have been through way too much in your life to keep laying down and letting things happen to you, stand up and fight. It does not matter if you’re too loud, it does not matter if people are offended, you stand up and fight for yourself!”

I know that he meant physically, but I took that And ran with it. I started to write my book that night and within four months my book was fully written. The only reason that it took four months was because I wrote a chapter about what happened to me in 2021 that caused me to move to Kansas City and that chapter took me aback. I wound up in a very deep depression for almost 2 months and I just had to stop writing.

When I was done writing, I had a sense of relief because every time that I sat down to type, God put me in a trance. I literally went back and saw every single thing that happened to me from childhood to adulthood. I got to see it in 3-D. With it being so fresh my book is literally Like a movie. There is not one part of my book that you cannot visually see just by reading it because I honestly was visually seeing it as I wrote it.

The nuggets that anybody can get from my book is that you can persevere. If I can get through all of the challenges that I went through and continue to praise God and be the strength for my family near and far, than anybody else can do it too! I did not come from a cookie cutter household. I did not come from a financially stable household. I did not come from a household full of love. But I did come from a household that told me about Jesus. They may not have been living by the Bible, but my parents both told me about Jesus and that’s what I went back to. I went back to the basics, and when I went back to the basics, I learned that I didn’t know who God was at all.

Learning who God was changed my whole life and I want that for everybody that I come in contact with!

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