The Beginning

So here she stood. Standing on the steps of the tiny, backwoods stairway, she realized how far she had come. She now had a name. Daisy had a name and a plan for how to start, for how to become who she wanted to be. 

There was no need to run away. She wouldn't run off to Vegas in a rash attempt at sudden fame and stardom. All this time she had thought she needed to escape to become the person she wanted to be, but in actuality, all she needed was to take a good look at herself, exactly where she was.

She had come full circle.

She had started at the beginning of the staircase and climbed all the way to the top, where she discovered something beautiful, something unexpected. Just beyond that tiny, cramped, back-alley staircase that reminded her of Greece, she found a beautiful, open space with a view of the HOLLYWOOD sign.

The inspiring view was more than just a metaphor for Daisy.

She had climbed from the bottom, the very first step, all the way to the top of the staircase, and discovered that she had been thinking about this all wrong.

In the beginning, she was scattered, clumsy.

In the beginning, she was lost.

In the beginning, she was no one.

Now, she had a plan.

Now, she knew exactly where she was.

Now, she was someone.

She would stay in Los Angeles, CA. It was exactly where she needed to be. After all she was still young. She had plenty of time and ideas to create her life. 

It was a new beginning. It was the top of the staircase. 

She took a deep breath, and leaped.

A Joyful Perspective

The nameless girl had decided to step out into the world and make something of herself. She was ready to do what she had to do in order to get to the next step. It was comforting to know that she at least had a plan, a track on which to continue. She was ready to embark on her pursuit of happiness, and she had a good idea about where to start. 

The first step was making a name for herself. She intended to do this both literally and figuratively. In her mind, she thought of herself as "Nameless Girl," because she had never truly decided who she was. She wanted something simple, and something that would remind her of what made her happy. She had always had an affinity for flowers, particularly those that grew wild, forever untame and always beautiful. Daisy. She would call herself Daisy from now on.

After that, she was stuck. Now what? What did she want to do? What about her "track" that was supposed to be so organized, so perfect? She chewed on her lower lip, processing.

She recalled a line from Roland Barthes' essay, From Work to Text: "The Text is not to be thought of as an object that can be computed."

Maybe planning her future so precisely WASN'T the way to go. Perhaps, like a text, her future couldn't be simply computed. Maybe it was more complicated than that.

Ok then, she would take baby steps. Baby steps and a pursuit of happiness. She could do this. Daisy could do this.

Cluttered

Finally, Nameless Girl felt like she was going somewhere. 
Was it the right direction?
Who knew?
Was it organized and clearly building up to something great?
Absolutely not.
Everything was perfectly, unspecifically, disorderly and awry, exactly the way she wanted it. She liked the CLUTTER. 

Clutter was safe.
There were plenty of things to hide behind if she got lost, or distractions to think about if she got off-track. When the first exploratory corner failed to meet her expectations, she searched for her answers elsewhere, just like Charles Marlow in Joseph Conrad's novella, Heart of Darkness. When he traveled to Africa, exploring his uncharted territory, he didn't find what he expected to find. 

He had to maneuver the many folds and obstacles that cluttered the journey. If he had found what he was looking for, exactly the way he expected it, there would be no lesson, no story.

Baby steps? No way, Jose. She would LEAP to the next step, perhaps even skipping a few now and then. She was breaking free of the outcast box, into the uncharted territory of her life. There were no rules. There would be no final evaluation. 

Her expectations were AbStrAcT. Her mind was open. Cluttered, perhaps, but clutter was safe. She was safe. And her opportunities were boundless.

She was ready.

Avant-Garde

She went down one step.

The nameless girl had never really felt as though she fit in anywhere. It was difficult to fit in to something specific when her whole life was rather UnSPecific. Sometimes she had expectations of what she wanted to be, but everything she sometimes desired was just too conventional. She wanted to be 

avant-garde.

Normality was outdated. She wanted to look at life the way she interpreted abstract paintings-without a specific picture or message in mind. She climbed another step. Now she was getting somewhere.

She thought about the steps she was climbing. They each told their own story, each had a different amount of wear-and-tear, and each was unique. It's own little building block to something bigger and better. They all played a part in the magnificence of the completed staircase.

 But what was the point? Did each step tell its own story? And how did it find its story?

What good was avant-garde if you couldn't come up with your area of avant-garde on your own? Nameless girl stood still on step #2. 

Then it came to her. Or rather, she arrived at it all on her own. She took another step up. She would continue NOT looking for it. For in life, is it not always common to come across it when you least expect it?

She would head towards a corner, and if she didn't discover what she was looking for then, she would choose a different corner.

SHE WOULD TAKE WHAT SHE COULD GET.

Stepping Out of the Box and up into the sky...

Straight down the line

She wondered if it would be easier to go the normal way and just take the 376 stairs to the top. She really wanted to hop right down the middle, stepping on the plants and decorative stones as she went. It reminded her of Greece, this tiny little walkway in Hollywood, California. So quaint, yet so descriptive, it seems to tell a story all by itself. How many stray cats wandered along the tops of the big brown picket fence? How many birds made soft nests in the canopy trees above? How many young children chased each other up these steps? The small neighborhood back-way was mysterious and beautiful...

Steps

   leading

      to a place and time

         where it matters not

            what background you come from

               or what you look like...

                  only if you can reach the top.

Places have a way of affecting the way that we see things. 

Sometimes a place can make us create stories about it............

Weaving our own ideas and images into its history.

Maybe it happened, and maybe it didn't...

But it happened somewhere...even if that somewhere was just in your mind.

Her story is forming as you are reading this...

Steps are reflective...When there are many, it takes time to get to the top, and once you get there, you have reached a conclusion. You either succeeded in climbing them, or you didn't. Sometimes the answer to success isn't always in completion....

But rather in how you attempted to make the climb.