The Prodigal Son

An Appetite for Debauchery

Even though my father and I had a strained relationship growing up, getting to go over his house some weekends was always a treat for me—namely because of just how much more freedom I got when I was with him as opposed to being with my mother's side of the family. My mother's side of the family is super religious. To this day, the TV in the living room at my Granny's house is almost always on the Christian channel and though I wouldn't call my family 'Bible beaters', faith and behaving like 'good Christians' has always been a core value of theirs.

I remember once when I was 6 or 7, my mom was arguing with her then boyfriend at the time and I overheard her say something to the effect of 'you been over there with those DAMN women!' Hearing this caused my little heart to drop to my stomach as I'd never heard my mom or anyone else from that side of the family curse before. Yes, I know that 'damn' is barely a bad word but the impact hearing her say that had on me should illustrate just how straight and narrow my family aimed to be. No cursing, no drinking, no partying, no hanging out late. There was supposed to be no premarital sex either, even though all my siblings and many of my cousins were created out of wedlock.

It was honestly a bit oppressive. I've spoken before about how, in my family, going to church was never optional. Being christian was not optional. Obeying the bible was not optional. Much like school, if you were too 'sick' to go to church then you had also better been too 'sick' to play, or even laugh, the entire rest of that day. Even though I grew up in the 'hood', my mom was always very particular about the kinds of kids I could hang out with which meant that despite being surrounded by kids most of the time, I still spent a lot of my childhood at my own house. Going to parties or people's houses that my mom didn't know personally was out of the question. Hell, even the type of music that I listened to was heavily scrutinized, as the contemporary RnB and Rap at the time was 'devil music' in my mom's eyes.

My saving graces were twofold:

1) older cousins who rebelled against this way of living, despite being judged for it, helped me understand and appreciate the secular world.

2) my father's side of the family was the complete opposite to my mother's side, so whenever I'd get to go to his house, the amount of freedom and exposure to 'worldly' living I experienced was always intoxicating.

My father's family drank a lot, cursed a lot, and partied a lot. Even though my father's mom went to church every now and then, I wouldn't really describe them as religious. And it was such a breath of fresh air when my father would pick me up for the weekend and I would be free to be a curious kid for 48hours or so.

It wasn't long until I started to use my ability to bounce between worlds to my advantage. As I mentioned earlier, my mom pretty much would never allow me to go to a kids party unless she knew the parents of the kid very well and since she wasn't really the social type, I very rarely got a chance to hang out. My father, on the other-hand, didn't give a fuck. Since he wanted to drink and party himself on weekends when he was supposed to pick me up, he was delighted whenever I would tell him there was a party I wanted to go to during my weekend with him because it meant that he could just drop me off somewhere and then go have his own fun. So, whenever there was a party coming up that I knew my mother would say 'no' to me going, I'd just conveniently forget to mention it to her, ask my father to come pick me up that weekend, and then have him take me to the party.

I have no idea what kids parties are like these days but when I was growing up, the kids parties very closely mimicked what was happening at adult parties, only without the alcohol. The Laurens County Skating Rink was the place to be for kids on the weekends and the venue for many of the kid parties that I'm referring to. Friday nights were for the white kids and the DJ would play all the top pop, rock, and country songs of the day for the white kids to skate around to. Saturday nights were for the black kids and the DJ would play all the top Rap and RnB songs of the day for the kids to grind to because there definitely wasn't much skating going on, lol. I was probably 11 years old when I got my first lap dance at the skating rink, and from that point on, getting dances became the ultimate goal of every party I attended, a goal that remained my main reason for going to parties even through college. Had my mom seen once how these young ladies gyrated against my nether regions, she would have never let me ever leave the house again.

Conversely, my father was proud at the thought that his son was pulling girls. I remember once I was staying at his place and I couldn't have been much older than 12—he was about to head out to go to work and told me them 'thangz' are in the tin can on his dresser if I needed to use one while he was gone. Them 'thangz' he was referring to were condoms, something that I'd seen and heard about but really had no concept of at the time. And even though he was probably joking, had he come back and seen one of his condoms missing, he probably would have been over the moon and would have asked me for details on the encounter, as opposed to reprimanding me.

At my father's house there was always smoking, drinking, partying, and different women coming and going. It was always exciting because it was so taboo compared to how I was being raised at my mom's house. And it honestly helped to create a divide in my personality that still exists to this day where one half of me loves light, peace, and positivity and the other half enjoys darkness, danger, and chaos. Above all, this time and freedom at my father's house gave me a taste for the world and I wanted as much more as I could get.

Lost In the World

Contrary to the assumptions of many, I didn't lose my virginity until soon after arrival to my freshman year in college. I'd been offered sex a few times in high school but always declined because it was never with someone who I found worth potentially getting stuck in my hometown forever for. Also because Laurens is such a small town that I was terrified that somehow news of my having sex would get back to my mother and she'd never let me leave the house again. This all changed very quickly once I got to experience the freedom of college and though I was a later bloomer, it didn't take long at all for me to make up for lost time.

I didn't start drinking until I was 19 and that's after promising myself that I'd never drink because I was so committed to not ending up like my father. The power of peer pressure and being recently initiated into a frat overwhelmed my values, though, and even though it took me a bit to warm up to the taste, by 20 I was easily going through a bottle of liquor or three every weekend with my friends.

To be honest, college was mostly a social game to me. I graduated with a 3.2 gpa, somehow, because my studies were never really a top priority but rather was something I needed to maintain in order to pursue what I was actually interested in — women. In college is definitely where women made the transition in my eyes from being people to being objects because the physical, mental, and emotional pleasure I received from them was truly much like a drug and just like my father, I loved to get high. At that point in my life, women provided the best high that I could get so I began to treat my relationships with them as means to that end and not much more.

Around my senior year of college, I'd decided that I wanted to be a musician full-time and had plans of moving out to L.A. in order to try and make those dreams a reality. Though, to be honest, being a musician was only the surface level of my true desire to be rich, famous, and powerful only because I knew that with these things, I would have endless access to my favorite drugs. Moving to Oklahoma City in 2014 to make music was my first step to achieving this goal and when I got to OKC, I continued much of the behavior that I'd began in college. There weren't too many Black men in OKC at the time and that worked to my advantage as I was treated as an exotic specimen, lol, and it was relatively easy to attract and add women to the roster.

Though we never really made too big of a splash, I really think my band, Vrex, had a real shot as we'd gotten some local recognition as amateur musicians and with time and development, I could really see us finding some success in larger markets. The plan was to make an album, start touring, and eventually end up in L.A. where I could fully bring my power fantasy into fruition and it seemed like I was on track to do just that.

With this newfound 'worldly' success, my ego grew bigger than it'd ever been before and pleasure became the God of my life. Had I had my way, my life would have continued in this trajectory perpetually but little did I know that a different God had other plans for me.

The Wake-up Call

About a year after arriving in OKC, I was awoken my a phone call from my mother at around 7am on a Wednesday. My mother never called me this early unless somebody had died so I answered the phone already anticipating bad news—though the news that I received was much worse than I could have ever imagined. She was crying when I answered which made my heart beat even faster. Then she told me through her shaking voice that she'd just left the doctor and they told her that she had Stage 4 Pancreatic Cancer. I did my best to hold it together and stay strong for her while we were still on the phone but as soon as she hung up, I lost it. I tried to get up and go to work but ended up just sitting at my desk crying for a couple hours before my supervisor eventually sent me back home.

To say I was devastated would be the understatement of the century. This news destroyed everything. Everything I believed, everything I desired, every plan I had laid out for me life. Suddenly, moving to L.A. was no longer a possibility as I felt this incredible responsibility to move back home and help care for my mom. Suddenly, I became much less interested in the world and much more interested in God and why the fuck he/she/it allowed my mother to get the worst kind of cancer. Suddenly, my life stopped being centered around pleasure and power and started being centered around seeking and finding answers to this new predicament I'd been placed in.

I've written extensively about how finding out about my mom's cancer diagnosis catalyzed the process of me going inward to find what I was looking for, so I won't reiterate here, but long story short, the tragedy of my mom getting the death sentence that is Pancreatic Cancer sent me on a quest to find God and get answers, and eventually, not only did I find God, but I found myself, and I found that how I'd been living had created so much unnecessary suffering for myself and those who were dealing with me.

One of my earliest memories is sitting on a lawn chair outside my childhood house and longing to go 'back home', even though I was at the only home I'd ever known. It was an intuitive knowing that where I was currently was not the only place I'd ever been and knowing that there was a home, somewhere out there, that was my true home quietly haunted me for my entire life. In hindsight, I never stopped looking for this home, it's just that I was looking for it in the wrong place; the wrong place being 'the world'.

Pleasure was a false idol that I used to escape the feeling of being homeless because the home I'd been born into didn't really feel like the home I knew in my heart. And I found that the home that I knew in my heart, the place I'd been longing for ever since I was a little boy, wasn't a physical place at all but rather is within my own soul and that in order to return to this home, I needed to stop focusing so much on the world that I'd grown so attached to and turn inward. I began this journey back home about 8 years ago and through the grace of God, this year, I arrived. And I know that I've arrived because that longing to return back home is completely absent along with every desire I had to gain pleasure, power, or purpose from the world.

The Prodigal Son

Whenever I would return back home from my father's house on weekends that he'd pick me up, my Granny would always jokingly say to me upon arrival that 'the prodigal son made it back home'. I never understood what she meant when she used to say it and honestly didn't care to find out—I thought it was just another one of those 'old people sayings' like, 'I reckon so', or 'you don't believe a cow horn a hook!' It wasn't until I began my spiritual journey and came across this parable with 'eyes that could see' that I had a full circle moment and understood just how profound my Granny calling me the 'prodigal son' was.

The Prodigal Son is a parable that appears in the Bible, told by Jesus about a son who gets lost in the world. He longs to leave home to chase his desires, thinking freedom means doing and getting everything he wants. He demands his inheritance from his father early, essentially saying, "I don’t need you, just give me what's mine." Then he leaves home to trick off all his money on fast mules and loose women—ending up broke, hungry, and humiliated, working as a servant feeding pigs.

At rock bottom, he finally realizes that even his father's servants live better than this. Swallowing his pride, he decides to go back home, not expecting to be welcomed as a son but hoping to be accepted to work as a servant. But when his father sees him coming, he doesn't hesitate—he runs to him, embraces him, and throws a huge celebration to commemorate his son's return. The father doesn't even let his son finish apologizing—he’s just happy that his son is back home.

It’s a story about the blindness of desire and of the grace of unconditional love. It's a reminder that no matter how far we stray, no matter how lost we get, no matter how 'sinful' we've lived, the door back home is always open to us, if only we have the humility to surrender and to return.

My Granny and my mom had no clue (maybe they did because mamas be knowin!) just what I was up to while I was at my father's house, but just like the prodigal son, I was enjoying the pleasures of the world while at his house, living 'in sin'. I've since discovered that the only way to truly live 'in sin' is to live unconscious of our true identity as the Divine awareness that sustains this world, as opposed to just being another creature in it. The only real 'sin' there is is believing ourselves to be separate from God and using that belief to leave home and follow our egos will instead of God's will. The identification with the ego is how each of us leave 'home' in the early years of our childhood—and the spiritual journey, the journey of returning back home, is a journey of overcoming the ego, overcoming separation consciousness, and returning to Union with the Divine—our Father, our Mother, our Home.

So, my Granny calling me the 'Prodigal Son' in her endearing way was also prophetic. Because even though I spent many years lost in the world, I'm not lost anymore. I've completely had my fill of the world, I have seen very clearly what it has to offer, and I'm not interested in any of it. It has been quite the journey, but The 'Prodigal Son' has returned for good and I'm happy to just be another servant in my Father's home.

What's Going On With Me?

Finishing this newsletter is so bittersweet. I started this year with the goal of publishing a newsletter each week this year and to be completely honest, I wasn't sure if I 'd be able to do it. And the fact that I have done it is easily one of the greatest accomplishments of my life. I plan to reflect more about this entire process in next week's newsletter so I won't speak too much about it here but let me just say, no matter if you've only read one of these newsletters or if you've (somehow) read all of them—from the bottom of my heart, thank you. Thank you for being here with me. Thank you for your interest as it often served as encouragement to keep going. Thank you for listening to my stories and sharing space with me as I untangled my past and got more clear than ever on who I am and what I'm here to do.

While this is an end, an end that I've very much looked forward to, lol—it is not the end but rather, another beginning. I feel like I needed to get all of this out and documented somewhere before I could start the next phase of my journey and I'm super excited to see what this next phase brings. In 2025, newsletters will be less frequent (and less long! 😬) but I will not be stopping them completely—I'm just reducing their frequency to have more bandwidth for other creations I'd like to offer and I'll speak more on those next week.

This has been the most challenging, most rewarding, and most transformative year of my life. It might seem small but accomplishing this goal of writing long form every week, despite the personal adversity I've faced this year, has shown me that I can do anything that I commit to, as long as it's coming from a pure place. Writing a book used to seem like such a mountain to me but this year, I've written enough to fill a couple books, and so, writing a book no longer seems like this farfetched thing that I hope to do and has become something that I'm definitely going to do and I'm going to start next year.

I truly hope these newsletters have and will continue to create value in your life and it's been my honor to grow with you this year. I would love to hear about how you've grown so, as always, feel free to shoot me a note if you'd like to talk about it. Next year we're going to root even deeper and rise even taller and whether we do it together or not, I hope that you'll continue to grow into your highest potential.

With all my love,

Micheal Sinclair 💜