What do you want to be known for?

The other day my husband and I were playing a game, Where Should We Begin?, created by psychologist Esther Perel, and a question came up:

What do you want to be known for?

I sat with the question for longer than I usually would. My knee-jerk reaction was that I want to be known for being inspiring. My next thought was that really, all I care about is that people think I’m kind.

But then I landed on something that felt truer, reflected to me by a friend a few weeks ago. She said: “Jenni, out of anyone I know, you most believe that there’s something ideal, and that people can get closer to that ideal. When I’m around you, I start to believe that I can have something better, too.”

It was a huge compliment, and it felt deeply true. I do believe, at my core, that we can ALL have something better if we work for it with intention and bravery.

This is especially important because I grew up believing the opposite: that the human experience was, for the most part, suffering. This was a belief held by my family of origin and by the religious worldview I was born into, which said: People are flawed. You must always be fixing yourself.

I was constantly sick as a kid, almost always in some sort of discomforting situation. But as I left my home, traveled the world…