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You Are Not Okay and Tomorrow Will Come

And you should eat a banana

Emily Kingsley
Human Parts
Published in
3 min readFeb 9, 2023

Photo by USGS on Unsplash

I felt like a god yesterday when I put a new double-A battery in the clock on my wall. For a few days, the second hand had been struggling to make it up past the number seven. It climbed a few tick marks and then fell, shuddering back down to the number six. I was stuck in perpetual 10:30.

With a new battery in place, the second hand marched proudly up the left side of the clock and then circled back down the right.

“I did that,” I thought, energized and exhausted at the same time. A minute is just so damned short and so freaking long at the same time.

I work at a high school, and to quote my teacher friend, “It’s bad. Baaaaaaaad.”

To be fair, it’s not all bad. My students can be delightful. Yesterday one wrote me a poem and the day before that one brought me a month-old candy cane.

But it’s also bad. Take a group of teenagers. Layer in anxiety, trauma, depression, poverty, and neglect and you’ve got a tiramisu of sadness. Serve it up to overworked, tired teachers and then also let a bunch of old white men pass laws about what should happen in the classroom. Also, cut funding so there’s not enough printer ink to go around. It’s bad.

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Human Parts
Human Parts
Emily Kingsley
Emily Kingsley

Written by Emily Kingsley

Always polishing the flip side of the coin. Live updates from the middle class. e.kingsleywhalen@gmail.com. She/her.

Responses (57)

What are your thoughts?

This is a well-written reminder that there are so many hard, horrible things out of our control and we can still do what we can. We can still take responsibility for whatever is in our control, and even if that doesn’t change our circumstances, it…

A brilliant piece. Just brilliant.

Obviously you are a God and an angel. I worked as a therapist in the Bronx and Brooklyn early in my social work career. So far just published one piece here… from that time….a rap I wrote w one of my kids called “fly” anyway… your writing is great and your humor! Necessary. Thanks for sharing. And.