In two days, I will turn 40.  I sit in Mendoza, Argentina and wonder if this was how my life was supposed to turn out, or did I so strongly will for something different that I landed myself on a path moving so rapidly and intensely that I can’t get off.  I can’t even remember what I thought my future looked like a year ago, or two years ago.  I suppose if I’ve learned nothing else in my 40 years, it’s that it never turns out the way we think it will.  But man, this is a great life! I think back to 654 days ago – my last day working in corporate America.  It was one of the absolute most scary days of my life.  I had no idea what I was going to do after I was done traveling, and I didn’t know if things would ‘work out.’  Months after leaving, I talked to mentors and peers, searching for some solid plan to move me forward.  Of course, no one could tell me exactly what to do.  The advice I always got was, “It will work out.  If you had the guts to leave your job, you can do anything.” I still frequently wonder if they are right.  Maybe it won’t work out, but I have to believe that the strong pull I’ve been having to do good in this world will turn into something wonderful and grand.  So I will keep going, because I am so fortunate to be able to.  And because I have done some really cool things this past year.  And I’m not just talking about becoming a Guinness World Record Holder (which is pretty bad ass)! This past week I took Spanish language placement test.  I passed into the C1 level, which is the ‘Fluent Speaker’ level.  There’s only one level higher, and that’s the ‘Native Speaker’ level.  When I landed in Argentina 10 months ago, I spent most of my nights researching how to learn a language faster.  It turns out the best way to learn it is to just do it.  I cried with my professors and there were days when I told Tony I just wanted to ‘go home.’  It was really, really hard.  But…I can actually call myself bilingual, and for this farmgirl from rural Ohio, that feels really cool.  I have no idea what I’m going to do with this new skill.  I’ve thought about teaching English to Spanish speakers when I get back to the US, or leading a Spanish-language meetup.  But what I do know is that I am better because of this experience, my mind is stronger, and I understand an entire part of our world that I could have never fully experienced or known had I not dropped myself into a strange place where no one was like me. Thanks for reading Wheels Travels! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. What I haven’t written about publicly is something new to me since I left my job all those months ago.  I was six months into my travels when I had this sudden desire to know what my medical diagnosis is.  My family and I have always been told it’s some sort of skeletal dysplasia, and most commonly we were told that I have diastrophic dwarfism.  This diagnosis never fit, mostly because I am at least five foot tall and people with diastrophic dwarfism are much shorter. My family and I have done genetic testing many times.  When I was a child (several times) and again when 23andme.com became a commodity.  The results were always inconclusive.  There was never a genetic (DNA) diagnosis for me.  I started to accept that science was just not advanced enough, and I may never know what this thing – this disability – that has caused me so much joy and so much heartache is.  I started to live with the uncertainty and it became a comfortable thing for me.  I suppose that could have led me to leave my job and enter into the uncertain.  I was just used to not knowing how things would turn out. But on a random day in October 2022, while visiting some islands in the South Pacific, I had a strong desire to know what my diagnosis was.  There must be some irony in the fact that I was in a place with little WiFi when I had this urge to research, extens