Values & Identity
Meet Jenn.
I am joyful. I am a daughter, a sister, a leader. I love to make others feel better. I embody kindness, grit, perseverance. I am a runner. I'm an overthinker, an analyst. I'm a future founder. I'm curious and passionate to a fault.
I want to be perceived as kind, empathetic, moderate, willing to listen and learn. A leader. Highly capable. Successful. Holistic. Joyful. A romantic lover of life.
“I recognize that others might find reading such open and honest thoughts to be uncomfortable, but they should know that I’m very aware that I have both a public and a private repository to the website, so that everything that’s public has intentionally been made so.”
Jenn, September 2026
The site has a public layer and a private one, and what is public was chosen piece by piece. The research on why the openness is there, and what it does for the person reading, sits further down this page: On being this open.
That the scars of your trauma, your lived experience, don't need to remain scars. You can paint over them with the loudest colors of your imagination, your perseverance, your will to love life exactly as it was. As it is.
The values that hold the structure up
Kindness
Kindness first. Extend grace.
This is the foundation everything else is built on.
I show kindness because it is who I am, not because it is easy.
I learned this in Hiroshima. I carry it everywhere.
Before honesty, before ambition, before anything: be kind.
We Care, We See, We Consider
The hours I pour into something for someone are not extra. They are the point.
Perfection to detail is what care looks like when it is real: every photo checked, every caption true, every word kept.
If it has your name on it, I saw you. I considered you. That is what we do.
Open Curiosity
I ask the next question. Then the one after that.
Curiosity is active. It is a commitment to never assuming you already know.
I am passionate to a fault, and I'd rather be that than indifferent.
Absurdity for New Meaning
The beautiful chaos of my mind is not a bug. It is the feature.
The thing that does not make sense is usually where the lesson starts.
The Taco Bell Ultra Marathon. College essays on a 22-mile run. This is how I think.
Radical Honesty
But kind first. Always kind first.
Radical honesty without kindness is cruelty. Kindness without honesty is cowardice.
I am telling you who I am. If you can't handle that, that's your problem to wrestle with and adjudicate. I have a far larger life project to execute.
Being Uncomfortable
Discomfort has usually meant I am close to something worth understanding.
I trust the awkward middle more than I used to.
I don't run from discomfort. I run through it, literally.
Built Ambition
I am a future founder. I know this about myself.
The ambition is real, but it lives next to joy.
I care about the life I am building, so I stay close to the work.
The Marathon Mindset
Pienso en mamá. ¿Cómo lo hiciste cuando fue tan difícil?
The relentless pursuit of perfection in running maps to everything else in life.
Started running in April 2022. The discipline, the suffering, the refusal to quit: it all transfers.
“Nunca dejé de creer en mí, tú también deberías creer en ti, vales más de lo que piensas”- Bad Bunny
Read: On Making It Yours →Vulnerability
Vulnerability makes honest connection possible.
I'm okay being vulnerable. That's beautiful.
I don't believe in erasing the past. There is always merit.
Everything happens for a reason only if I am willing to understand what the lesson was.
We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster that we go bankrupt.
Why the site reads the way it does
On being this open
This site says more about its author than most. The values are stated so they can be checked. The fears and truths are listed on Jennisms so they can be studied instead of managed. A whole saved folder is read in public on The Saved Folder so that every platitude has to survive the research. The essays begin inside a felt moment because that is where the thinking started. What reads as intimacy is a record kept in the open, on purpose, for the reader who wants to know how the thinking works and not only what it concluded.
“Vulnerability makes honest connection possible.”
the values above
“I'm okay being vulnerable. That's beautiful.”
the values above
“I have a degree in expressing feelings.”
Jennisms, truths
“Therapy didn't hand me a fix so much as a diagnosis: the way I'd learned to move through the world was overcompensation.”
On Love
What the research says about saying it out loud
01
Naming
In a laboratory task, labeling emotions in images was associated with reduced amygdala responses. This is evidence about a particular task, rather than a measurement of what writing this site does.
Lieberman et al., 200702
Saying it
In experiments, sharing information about oneself engaged reward-related brain regions, and participants sometimes gave up money to do it. The findings help explain why disclosure can feel rewarding.
Tamir & Mitchell, 201203
Being seen
Research links disclosure and liking, with effects that depend on context. Separate experiments found that observers often evaluated vulnerability more positively than the person showing it did.
Bruk, Scholl & Bless, 2018Collins & Miller, 1994
04
The cost of keeping it
Across studies, thinking about secrets outside moments of concealment was associated with lower well-being. That finding does not establish that public disclosure is the right response for everyone.
Slepian, Chun & Mason, 2017The dated entries record how Jenn’s account of herself has changed. These studies offer context for thinking about disclosure; they do not diagnose her, measure her nervous system, or establish why any particular change happened. The personal account belongs to the entries themselves.
Sources: Lieberman, M. D., et al. (2007). Putting feelings into words. Psychological Science, 18(5). Tamir, D. I., & Mitchell, J. P. (2012). Disclosing information about the self is intrinsically rewarding. PNAS, 109(21). Collins, N. L., & Miller, L. C. (1994). Self-disclosure and liking: A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 116(3). Bruk, A., Scholl, S. G., & Bless, H. (2018). Beautiful mess effect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 115(2). Slepian, M. L., Chun, J. S., & Mason, M. F. (2017). The experience of secrecy. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113(1).
I am a first-generation Hispanic woman who grew up below the poverty line.
That is the foundation. Everything I've built, including the ambition, the joy, and the grit, comes from knowing where I started and refusing to forget it.
I am proud of who I am. And it took a lot of work to get there. The decisions I make to support that are all part of the feedback loop.
I accept that I am fallible. That there is always more to learn, more eras to experience, more growth to be had.
The Compass
There are phrases, words, moments I keep returning to, a web that has become my compass in life.
On a 22-mile run, I was thinking: what are the values I have? What are the phrases I always go back to? I kept returning to the words that ground me: remember where you came from, keep looking closer, trust what you have survived. Things to myself in Spanish, to remember. Remembering my mom and what makes me me. That's the foundation.
The more I say them, the more aligned I feel. It brings a sense of peace because the words point me back to what matters.
This page is not branding. It is a reminder to myself.
If it resonates with you, I am glad you found it.