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I’ll be honest with you, because that’s the whole point of this book — and it should be the point of this blog too.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been quietly asking myself: *did I write this for nothing?*

Not because no one liked it. People have messaged me — some of you reading this right now — to say how much *Strength Through the Messy & Beyond* meant to you. That it felt like someone finally wrote the book you needed and couldn’t find. Those messages are real, and I’ve read every single one more than once.

But here’s the part I don’t usually say out loud: the sales numbers weren’t moving. And when the thing you poured a year and a half into isn’t visibly landing, it’s very easy to let the quiet in the numbers speak louder than the voices that told you it mattered. I started wondering if “good enough” for the people who found it was actually just… good enough, full stop. Whether I’d built something real, or something that only worked for the handful of people who happened to bump into it.

That question showed up in the exact worst month to be asking it.

Because this hasn’t just been a normal few weeks. We got back from holiday — croissants, French wine, the whole thing — to aircon that didn’t work for two weeks before the new units finally went in. In that same stretch: closing out the preschool chapter for the little ones, officially withdrawing my oldest from the school she’s known for years to move her toward a local primary next year, fixing my youngest’s schedule around all of it, launching the book, and restarting with clients who are honestly still half in holiday mode themselves.

And that last one is where it got funny, in a not-actually-funny way. When your calendar is emptier than usual because everyone’s still catching their breath, the coach in you starts asking her own oldest question: *am I good enough?* Same question as the one about the book. Just wearing a different outfit.

Meanwhile I was restarting my own training after two months of far less movement than I’d like to admit — carrying toddlers up the stairs counts as strength training, right? — and trying to get back to actual meals instead of the holiday version of “healthy eating.” I showed up for my own workouts anyway, even in the middle of all of it, because I know how much better and stronger it makes me feel. Not as another task on the list — as the thing that actually gets me through the list.

If you’ve read the book, you already know where this is going, because I basically wrote the thesis of this exact month before I lived it: *real strength isn’t built in perfect conditions. It’s built in a changing body, in a life that never stays still — in the season you’re actually in, not the one you’re waiting for.*

I wrote that sentence for you. I did not expect to need it myself quite this literally, quite this fast.

And then, in the middle of all of it — school forms, boxes, second-guessing whether the book even mattered — it landed at **#1 in Pregnancy on Amazon.** Not because I pushed harder that week. If anything, it was one of the weeks I had the least left to give it. It just… happened, while I was busy doing the messy, unglamorous work of actually living the thing I wrote about.



I don’t think that’s a coincidence I get to take credit for. But I also don’t think it’s nothing.

Here’s what I’m taking from it, for whatever it’s worth to you too: the quiet stretch where nothing seems to be moving isn’t proof that the work wasn’t good enough. Sometimes it’s just the part of the story that happens before the part you can see. I couldn’t see the sales moving. I could see the DMs. I could see my daughter’s new uniform list. I could not see, at the time, that both of those were still adding up to something.

So — was it worth it? I’m not going to pretend I have a tidy answer, because tidy isn’t really what this book, or this month, has been about. But I keep coming back to the same instruction I gave you in the closing chapter, and now I’m going to take my own advice: **adjust, don’t quit.**

To everyone who told me this book helped you — thank you. You were the numbers that actually counted, long before Amazon told me anything.

*— Daniëlle*
*Women’s Strength & Wellbeing Coach | Founder of ActiveWomen | Mum of 3*