Jaime Green

I’m very excited to be a judge in this year’s Tournament of Books. I got to read and write about two great books, Bats of the Republic and The Turner House. And then I did this:

The Patronizing Questions We Ask Women Who Write -- The Cut

Coming back to the Upper East Side today made me feel aware of wealth in a 21-year-old way again, very different from the awareness-of-wealth that I’m used to in Brooklyn. Women five years older than me strode out of Park Avenue co-ops like the ones I used to tutor in. A housekeeper walked a slow, fat pug. A Madison Avenue storefront of simple, neutral, drapey clothing told me, This is not for you, with a hint of and probably never, right?

After working for nine months at the Met, navigating mapless became a little party trick of mine, performed for myself or, once, a date (reader, I married him). I have most of it, still, enough not to take a map when I bought my admission, but not enough to avoid checking my phone a few times, zooming in on the museum’s outline in Google Maps until rooms and floor levels appeared. 

I visited a marble sculpture in the American Wing Courtyard that used to feel very meaningful to me, when I was about 25. Now I’m 33 and she seemed too frail, too delicate—instead I wanted to spend time with a new (to me?) statue against a wall of the courtyard, a monumental woman emerging from a block of stone, strong nose and strong arms and Art Nouveau robes draped all around her, flowing out of the stone. 

[I sent this as an email this morning to @merlin​ Mann & Dan Benjamin about recent episodes of their podcast, Back to Work. I want it to live here, too.] 

Hi Merlin and Dan. I've been thinking a lot about something you said, Merlin, on last week's Back to Work, and it just combined with something you said a long time ago in a really helpful way.

The idea from last week was that when we look back at our past selves with regret or frustration, we should remember—or at least consider—that we did the best we could. We did what we could. I've been struggling lately—i.e. my whole adult creative life—with focus. I lose time on twitter or trawling the internet, and then I get really mad at myself. Right now I'm working on a big writing project under a tight deadline, and this idea of "Hey, I did what I could" sounded, rather than resigned, very compassionate to me. (It's a good counter to the narrative that we procrastinate so that we can say "Well, it's not my best, but I finished it," to have an excuse for failure. Instead, this reminds me to say, "This was my best, and it happened the way it happened.")

This connects, for me, with another hugely useful thing you've said. It might not even have been a metaphor, but it's become a very important metaphor for me. It's your instructions for opening jars. Basically: don't just grip tighter, focus on your shoulder (or something), etc. This has become a guiding metaphor for me in thinking about habit-change. I can't just buckle down harder. That's often my instinct. NO TWITTER TODAY FROM 9AM TO 6PM. I do this—lots of us do this—with food, too. NO JUNK FOOD. SEVENTEEN SERVINGS OF VEGETABLES. TRY TO HAVE ONE PERFECT DAY, JUST ONE. And, duh. It. Does. Not. Work. Because we're just trying to grip the lid of the jar harder and harder and harder.

The thing I realized from putting these two ideas together is that sometimes our arms just aren't strong enough yet for a particular jar. If I can't lift a heavy weight at the gym, I don't get mad at myself for not being strong enough. But if I can't write for five hours straight, or if I long for twitter, I get mad at myself. I feel like a failure. But my brain-muscles just aren't there yet!