I'm Wendy — an American immigrant who traded the hustle for peace. Not stillness.
Internal quiet. But that's not how this story began.

It began in debt. $414,000 of it. My husband and I sat with that number in 2012 and
made a decision most people don't get the chance to make — we said yes to fixing it.
Faith, family, and a relentless focus to get out of where we were. We didn't know yet
that we were also buying ourselves a door. We just knew we wanted out.

Two years later, the door opened. Germany. A one-year work assignment, the kind
companies hand out like a short-term loan they expect back. We didn't want to give it
back. We loved it there — the rhythm of it, the foreignness of it — enough to stay a
little longer. God does answer prayers!

Then in 2018, a Dutch company came looking for someone like me, and Germany
became another chapter, and the Netherlands became the rest of the book.

This may sound easy. Trust me, it was not. Moving abroad rarely is. There is a
particular kind of loneliness in not having the words — in standing in a pharmacy or a
cafe, smiling, nodding, understanding nothing. There is a frustration in being capable
in one language and a child in another. Nobody warns you how exhausting it is to
simply exist somewhere unfamiliar, day after day, year after year.

But here is the other truth, the one that took eight years to fully believe: it was worth
it.

Not because every day was beautiful. Some days were just garbage duty, in the rain,
same as anywhere. But our ordinary life here — affordable healthcare, food that is
actually food, the strange relief of being allowed to just be myself — that ordinary life
became the peace we'd been chasing without knowing its name.

Then, in 2024, the ground shifted, and everything I had become used to was gone. I
was laid off.

I didn't go back to my birth country. I went to school instead — Dutch language
school, ten hours a day, five days a week, for six long, tedious weeks, the kind of
immersion that breaks you down before it rebuilds you. I took the inburgering exam. I
passed the first four on the first try but failed spectacularly on the speaking exam —
not once, but twice. Feeling frustrated but determined, I took it again, and as they say,
the rest is history. We are now permanent Dutch residents.

None of this was the plan, but it all became the life we are actually living.

And the layoff gave me something I hadn't asked for: a year. I stepped back from
everything and just lived — taking stock, grieving a lot, slowly falling in love with the
idea of building something that was mine. I spent part of that year doing the thing I
love most in the world: traveling.

We visited several new countries in those twelve months, which tells you everything
about how I process a crossroads. I don't sit in a hotel room and think. I walk into a
local supermarket and learn — because nothing tells you more about a culture and its
people faster than what's stacked on its shelves. But what travel also does is help me
see things from a different angle. By the end of that year I'd crossed the 40-country
mark, and somewhere in there, without quite noticing the moment it happened, I had
also decided what came next. Instead of going back to the corporate world, I decided
to take a chance at building something of my own.

Where will all of this end? I have no idea, but what I do know is, I'm going to keep
Enjoying the Journey.