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05092023 i'm feeling 22!
today marks 22 rotations around the sun for miss arielle lok (that’s me!)!!
i’d always write a birthday entry in the physical diary i’ve kept since i was 12. i lost this diary last year and it actually destroys me to not know where it is. somewhere in my childhood closet, it lays there dormant and i pray that no eyes ever fall upon the edgy words i wrote.
today, i write these entries on my Personal Site. ever since morgan set up cloudflare with me, i am ever so cognizant that a LOT of people actually read these and it makes me a bit nervous. i grew up as an internet gorlie so whenever i write, my audience is a void that i am comfortable screaming into… but recently, i’ve been beginning to meet people in real life who actually… know me before meeting me… and it’s a weird adjustment that i oddly enjoy!
anywho. here’s my annual reflection of another year on this wonderful planet.
i am on the cusp of something great. i do not stare into the mirror every morning and repeat manifestations, but if i did, this would be it. life has felt loiter-y in the past few months. i’m not actively working anymore but unhurried days still pass quickly, and if it wasn’t for the fact i’ve logged everyday of my life for the past 7 years, i think i would go insane thinking about “wasted days”.
the reality is that there are no wasted days. a few days ago, i embarrassingly rented a truck that i could not drive (my friend informed me it was a manual as she dropped it off at my place) and i sat on the curb in tears reading WikiHow articles on How To Drive Stick. i was already so stressed about moving; i was covered in paint from… nefarious activities the night before and i was also running on 3 hours of hungover sleep. i just wanted to lie on the road and let fate take the steering wheel.
indeed, fate dealt me a deck of cards and a Jack came to my rescue (pun fully intended).
i have only had 2 interactions (both lasting <5 minutes) with jack in the days prior. i texted him that i was going to be late to dropping off furniture at his place because i simply Can Not Drive Stick. he replied “oh, i drove stick all through hs” and i ubered him over to my place so he could drive this mf for me. we loaded the remainder of my furniture and hopped into the front. he took one look around the dash and - here’s the kicker: it was an automatic. i had a nervous breakdown over a manual truck that wasn’t even a manual. i never doubted my friend’s statement for a minute and accepted my fate as a non-stick driver.
and yet, we just laughed it off. i wrote off my wasted tears and the two of us, strangers, just cackled in the front of this stupidly large, automatic vehicle at the silliness of my anxiousness. “today is a great day,” jack said, and i wholeheartedly agreed.
we spent the next few hours moving large furniture across marine drive drenched in sweat from the combination of lifting tables up flights of stairs and the relentless sun. i wore the same makeup from the night before and exclaimed “this is so much fun!” even when it Really Was Not That Fun, and it was jack’s turn to agree.
in my 22 years on earth, i have never filled a gas tank. on this particular day, i had to fill the truck’s tank and i quietly confess to jack that i had no idea what i was doing. he takes a few seconds to laugh at the absurdity of the situation. “you’ve sold a company but you don’t know how to fill a gas tank?!” and we again, laugh at the absurdity of the entire day so far.
“i have got to say,” i began as we walked back to my empty apartment after returning the truck to its rightful home, “thanks for coming to my (fake) rescue - i feel so lucky sometimes. this was so much fun and life is so good right now.” mascara is still all over my cheeks.
“i like how you think about life for what it is. i do the same!” he replies
“what do you mean?”
“i mean that you realize how lucky we are to be just… here!”
he then tells me of a conversation he had with jacky earlier in the year. “[he] told me this quote that’s really stuck with me. it was along the lines of ‘great days make great years, and great years make a great life. so if you don’t think that your days are great, how are you ever going to believe that your life is great?’” …and that kinda blew my mind (or maybe i was growing delirious from sleep deprivation).
i’m just about finished reading a short history of nearly everything and my biggest takeaway is that human life is fickle and meaningless in the grand scheme of the planet. though instead of existentialism, i only feel lucky to be alive in the right conditions AND the best times we’ve seen for innovation. i am the right combination of atoms in this gazillionth percentage fraction point of time. and thank god i am not inhaling stupid amount of lead everyday. no amount of clicking “i’m feeling lucky!” could ever bring another individual to be me now, arguably one of the luckiest people ever imo!!!
twenty-two years on this earth and i know i have lived an incredible life already, again & again & again. there is not a single cell in my being that wants to stop! even in my worst moments, i naively cope by telling myself that it just feels so good to be sad, that the ability to feel full breadths of emotion is a uniquely human trait that i must treasure. the entirety of january to now has felt so unbelievably terrible in moments that i cannot share [now] and yet i still cannot help but feel like this was a fantastic year for arielle fans around the world (me).
the downtime i’ve had in the past summer made me appreciate slower days, taking longer routes, and never GPSing my way around cities. moving out of vancouver last week was the end of my early adulthood and i had one last cry on the 49 to think about how bittersweet closing chapters can be, but it quickly transformed itself into something much more beautiful. the last ~2 years were phenomenal and when i look back now, they were some of the best times i’ve had in my existence thus far. i am going to look back and think that my present days were the best of times, so i need to live like these are the best of times!
i am on the cusp of something great. i repeat this to myself over & over in the silence of my own company and it drives another principle i gained at the ripe age of 22: everyday is a good day and some days are just greater than others. i do not think i fully gained consciousness until i was like, 10 years old. when i use this as my frame of reference, i have only lived my OWN life for 12 years and i have already been able to do, love, and learn so much. say i put 65 years as my upper limit on doing cracked girl shit. i’m just about at ~20% completion; there is so much time left to do so much more, i am VERY capable of doing so much more, and it is implausibly exciting.
i grow every year and genuinely feel it. years do not blend together to me. they are distinct and each new rotation around the sun presents a new evolution of the arielle from the year prior, stronger, more resilient, confident, sometimes happier, sometimes not, but she is still the same ari i’ve known forever. there is no (absolute) maxima peaking. perpetual advancement is a fantastic feeling and my goal is to continue this trajectory for as long as i can. great days make a great life and i will strive to make every day greater than the last.
happy 22nd birthday, arielle! love you so, so much!!!
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