From The Ashes
From the Ashes: Phoenix Center and the Flight Out
Years ago, I walked into the Phoenix Center in Concord, CA carrying nothing but ashes.
Rock bottom has a sound. It’s the door closing behind you at a shelter. It’s your name called in a courtroom. It’s the silence after you realize you have no address, no job, no plan, and a record that follows you like a shadow. That was my ashes stage. The hardest part wasn’t being homeless. It wasn’t the mental health spirals or the criminalization of just trying to survive. The hardest part was believing I’d always be there — that ashes were all I’d ever be.
But the Phoenix Center was named right. Because even in ashes, something is still there. A seed. An ember.
The Cocoon Stage
Leaving the ashes didn’t happen all at once. It happened in the cocoon. That’s what I call the ugly middle — where you’re not who you were, but not yet who you’ll be.
It was dealing with the court — dates, fines, probation, the weight of “criminalization” stamped on my file. It was learning that systems built to punish don’t teach you how to rebuild. You have to teach yourself.
In the cocoon, you dissolve. Everything you thought you knew about yourself breaks down. And that’s terrifying. But it’s also necessary. You can’t grow wings with the same bones that got broken.
Becoming the Butterfly
A butterfly doesn’t emerge perfect. The wings are wet. Heavy. The first flight fails.
But I flew anyway.
It meant facing the legal past head-on. Getting dismissed charges expunged. Filing motions in Oregon, waiting out the 120-day DA review, understanding that 4-5 months from ashes to cleared record is the price of freedom. It meant walking taller because the weight was gone.
And it meant school. From high school , classes to community college to now — a PhD program. Me. The one they said was too far gone. In a doctoral program, writing, researching, proving that “formerly unhoused” and “future doctor” can live in the same sentence.
Why the Phoenix Flies Forward
I didn’t rise just to rise. I rose because I looked back and saw the next woman walking into Phoenix Center with her own pile of ashes.
That’s why the nonprofit has to exist. Because nobody tells you how to go from criminalization to PhD. Nobody hands you a map from shelter bed to housing portfolio. Nobody explains that mental health and physical health and financial health are all the same wing — if one tears, you don’t fly.
Young women and women need someone who’s been in the fire to say: The ashes aren’t the end. The cocoon isn’t forever. You will be a butterfly. You will walk taller. You will help the next one up.
The Phoenix Center gave me a place to burn down and start over. My life now is the proof that rising is possible. Not easy. Not fast. But possible.
Years ago, I was ashes in Concord. Today, I’m building housing, clearing records, earning letters after my name, and planning the day I can open the door for her — whoever she is — and say, “I’ve been where you are. Let me show you the sky.”
That’s what phoenixes do. We rise. And then we reach back.
* Cathrynmharris
