Why It Took Me Twenty Years to Write My First Book

The Story Behind Delicately Made of Steel

I never dreamed of becoming an author.

In fact, if you had told me twenty years ago that I would one day write a book, I probably would have smiled politely and changed the subject.

Not because I didn’t love words.

But because, deep down, I wasn’t yet convinced that my voice mattered enough to write them.

Isn’t it interesting how life has a way of asking us to become the very thing we once believed we couldn’t be?

Twenty years ago, while I was raising my two daughters as a single mother, completing my Bachelor of Nursing, and building a career as a registered nurse, something unexpected happened.

During a massage, a therapist who knew only pieces of my story paused, looked at me, and quietly said five words that would stay with me for the next two decades.

“Renae, you are delicately made of steel.”

The moment she spoke them, something inside me knew.

Not that I was supposed to write a book that day.

But that those words belonged to something much bigger than I yet understood.

I wrote them down.

Then I went back to living my life.

Or perhaps more accurately…

I went back to becoming.

Over the next twenty years, I filled journals.

I scribbled ideas on sticky notes.

I wrote chapters that would later be rewritten.

I collected questions more than answers.

Looking back now, I don’t believe I was writing a book for twenty years.

I believe I was becoming the woman who could finally write it.

Because some books aren’t simply written.

They’re lived first.

For more than twenty years, I had the extraordinary privilege of working as a registered nurse, much of that time in home care and palliative care. I stood beside families during some of the most sacred and vulnerable moments of their lives.

I witnessed first breaths.

I witnessed final breaths.

I sat beside grief.

Hope.

Regret.

Love.

And when you spend enough time at the bedside, something changes inside you.

You begin to see what truly matters.

No one wished they had spent more time proving themselves.

No one wished they had worried more about what other people thought.

No one wished they had abandoned themselves in order to belong.

Those conversations never left me.

At the same time, I was raising two incredible daughters.

Motherhood became one of my greatest teachers.

It showed me that what we hand down to the next generation is rarely our advice.

It’s the relationship we have with ourselves.

Children don’t simply become what we tell them.

They absorb what we model.

That realization changed me.

As I began working with teenage girls and later founded Unwritten Academy, I saw many of the same struggles I had witnessed in women.

Different ages.

Different circumstances.

The same invisible patterns.

The same questions about worth.

The same fear of using their voice.

The same habit of becoming who they believed they needed to be rather than discovering who they already were.

Eventually, I stopped asking, “What’s wrong with us?”

And I began asking a different question.

How did we get here?

And perhaps even more importantly…

What are we passing on?

The truth is, I wasn’t separate from those questions.

I was living them.

I grew up knowing who I was supposed to be.

I understood expectations.

I understood responsibility.

I understood how to be dependable, capable, and strong.

But somewhere along the way, I had quietly learned something else.

That parts of me were easier to love when they stayed small.

That using my voice could make other people uncomfortable.

That belonging sometimes required self-abandonment.

Like so many women, I became very good at being who I thought I needed to be.

Until life began asking harder questions.

Questions about identity.

Questions about faith.

Questions about purpose.

Questions about who I was beneath the roles I had carried for everyone else.

Looking back now, I can see what I couldn’t see then.

Life wasn’t punishing me.

It was preparing me.

What I call in my book divine coordinates began appearing everywhere.

A stillbirth.

Single motherhood.

Twenty years in nursing.

Heartbreak.

Healing.

Female friendships.

Relationships that stretched me.

Leaving the security of a profession I loved to answer a calling I could no longer ignore.

What I once experienced as separate events now feel like chapters in the same story.

Each one asking me the same question.

Who are you beneath all of this?

That question eventually led me into the study of Spiritual Psychology, where I became a certified practitioner and began exploring the relationship between the conscious and subconscious mind, identity, human behaviour, and the remarkable capacity we all have to heal.

It deepened something I had already begun to witness throughout my nursing career.

People rarely struggle because they lack potential.

More often, they struggle because they’ve spent years living from inherited beliefs, unconscious patterns, and identities they never consciously chose.

That realization became the foundation of my work.

And ultimately, it became the foundation of Delicately Made of Steel.

People often ask me what the title means.

To me, Delicately Made of Steel represents the woman who no longer believes she has to choose between strength and softness.

She understands that compassion is not weakness.

That intuition is intelligence.

That courage doesn’t always arrive loudly.

And that true leadership begins within.

It is a book about spiritual sovereignty.

Generational healing.

The psychology of identity.

The power of feminine leadership.

And the extraordinary ripple effect that occurs when one woman chooses to heal—not only for herself, but for everyone who comes after her.

For a long time, I thought I was writing a book.

Now I understand something different.

I believe this book was written through me.

It became a calling I could no longer ignore.

A message that refused to stay inside me.

Because some messages become too important to keep to ourselves.

As I think about my daughters, the thousands of women and girls I’ve had the privilege of walking alongside, and now my granddaughter, Georgia, I think less about success and more about inheritance.

Not financial inheritance.

Human inheritance.

The beliefs we pass down.

The courage we model.

The healing we choose.

The relationship we have with ourselves that future generations quietly absorb.

I believe every one of us leaves a legacy.

Not simply through what we accomplish.

But through who we become.

Writing Delicately Made of Steel has never been about becoming an author.

It has been about answering a calling.

A calling to give language to what I have witnessed as a nurse, lived as a woman, discovered through my own healing, and now have the privilege of sharing with others.

If there is one hope I have for this book, it is not simply that you enjoy reading it.

It is that somewhere within its pages you begin asking your own deeper questions.

That you become curious about the stories you’ve inherited.

The beliefs you’ve carried.

The woman you’ve always been beneath the expectations of the world.

Because I believe our lives are not measured by how much we accumulate.

They are measured by the courage we have to become fully ourselves.

It took me twenty years to write my first book.

Not because it took twenty years to find the words.

Because it took twenty years to become the woman who could finally write them.