I answer to Ashlei. I write as A.P. Brown. And to my Sorors of Sigma Chi Psi Sorority, Inc., I am known as PHOENIXX #46. Funny how life will hand you a name before you fully understand why it fits.

A phoenix is not powerful because it avoided the fire. It is powerful because the fire failed to finish it.

That part, I understand intimately.

I have been the strong one, the dependable one, the one people could lean on while I quietly figured out where to put my own weight. I have survived trauma, grief, disappointment, rejection, self-doubt, and seasons when my greatest accomplishment wasn't a degree, a title, a business, or another line on my résumé.

It was staying.

Today, I am an author, psychology graduate, Clinical Mental Health Counseling graduate student specializing in trauma and crisis, community advocate, and founder of Purposely Stained™. I am proud of those things. EXTREMELY proud, actually. But none of them tell you the most important thing about me.

I am still becoming.

For years, I thought the hardest parts of my story were evidence that something about me was broken. I spent a lot of time standing outside the proverbial glass, watching belonging seem effortless for everyone else. I knew how it felt to be included but not chosen, needed but not necessarily held, strong enough to carry everyone else while wondering who would notice when I got tired.

Eventually, I realized something.

Standing outside the glass taught me how to recognize everyone still standing there.

And the fire?

The fire taught me that surviving something does not require pretending it never burned.

That is the heartbeat of Purposely Stained™.

The phoenix you see throughout this space isn't here because it looks beautiful in purple and gold, although, respectfully, she absolutely does. It is here because it represents what I believe about becoming. A phoenix does not rise as though the fire never happened. It rises from it.

That is what it means to be purposely stained.

Some stains were chosen. Some were handed to us. Some came from loving, losing, failing, surviving, grieving, growing, or simply living long enough to discover that life rarely asks permission before rearranging us.

But a stain is not a sentence.

It does not determine your worth. It does not cancel your future. And it sure does not mean your story is over.

Purposely Stained™ is the space I once needed myself. It is where accomplishment and imperfection are allowed to sit at the same table. Where I can hold my degrees in one hand and my disappointments in the other without either invalidating the other. Where strength doesn't require performance, healing doesn't require perfection, and nobody has to pretend they have figured out this beautifully complicated business of being human.

Through writing, speaking, advocacy, community work, and the counselor I am becoming, I want to create spaces where people can take off the armor for a minute. Exhale. Put the bags down. Tell the truth. Laugh when it's inappropriate. Cry when it isn't convenient. Be brilliant and messy and healing and uncertain and powerful, sometimes all before lunch.

Because survival kept me here. But purpose gave “here” somewhere to go.

Maybe that is why PHOENIXX fits after all.

I did not come through the fire untouched.

I came through stained.

Wiser. Louder. Softer in some places. Stronger in others. Still imperfect. Still healing. Still becoming.

And very much still here.

Welcome to Purposely Stained™.

There is room for you here.

And one of the greatest things I have learned is that there is finally room for me here, too.

With Purpose,
Ashlei “A.P.” Brown
PHOENIXX #46