Keep On Movin'!

Full Circle Moments

I slept on the floor last night. The junk service I hired came early on Saturday to take my mattress and bed frame, which meant I had to spend my last night in Pittsburgh on a pallet I didn't make with nearly as much care as my Grannie used to. This was a full-circle moment for me because the next morning I was headed back to South Carolina to spend time with her. For about a year when I was around 10, me, my mom, and my two brothers moved into my Grannie's house—a two-bedroom, maybe 700-square-foot house—that somehow housed seven people at that time. My bed during that period was a cot on the floor of the living room.

We had just moved out of the double-wide trailer owned by the man my mom thought she was going to marry. A double-wide trailer that, for the first time in my childhood, made me feel like we weren't poor, because a double-wide in Laurens, SC was luxurious living. A double-wide trailer I had come to love mostly, if not only, because it was the first time in my life that I had my own room. Having my own room was always a dream of mine because for the first ten years of my life, I had always shared a room with my older brother. So finding out we were moving was devastating, at first.

I remember it like it was yesterday: my mom sitting in front of the kitchen sink in that double-wide trailer, washing and packing dishes into a box. I didn't know exactly what my mom and this man's issues were, but I knew they argued a lot. He was trying to talk her out of leaving, but it wasn't working. He then turned to me and said, "Micheal, tell her you don't want to leave." And me, not really understanding the gravity of the situation and definitely not wanting to lose my room, said, "Do we have to go, Ma?" To which she immediately got emotional and said to me through choked-back tears, "You know we have to go, Micheal."

Moving sucks.

To the extent that I can almost understand why some people pick one place and never move anywhere else. And it’s not just the physical exertion—it’s the psychological and emotional strain as well. My mom was right; I did know that we had to go. She’d been struggling for so long, trying to hold on, but she wasn’t happy, and staying had begun to be so much more painful than walking away could ever be. So she walked away. And for about a year, she stayed with her mom while she got her life back together as a single parent.

First, she saved up enough to buy herself a used car. Then she saved up enough to move us into a single-wide trailer. A single-wide trailer that I was so ashamed to live in—a clear downgrade from the peace and comfort I had enjoyed only a year prior. And the worst part? I was now sharing a room with my older brother again, which not only erased any sense of privacy but also meant I had to obey his rules or be bullied.

It was really hard for all of us living in that trailer—but we persevered. And after about a year, my mom was in a position to move us out of it and into a bigger house than any of us had lived in before. A house where I had my own room again. A house where I began to learn how to be more independent. A house where I gained the courage to fight back against my older brother. A house where I would grow into a teenager and then a young adult. A house where my mom would become more financially stable than she had ever been. A house where my mom would eventually take her last breaths. A house that became a home because my mother had the courage to keep on moving.

Perhaps that’s why I can’t stay put for too long. Not so much because I can’t be content or because I need a lot to be happy, but more so because I haven’t found a house (or apartment) that has truly felt like home yet. I haven’t found a city that has truly felt like home yet. And that’s much of why I’m back in SC for a little while before moving somewhere else. Because I don’t want to just jump to another city that I may very well feel disconnected from. So I’m taking a bit of a pause to get my bearings and spend some time getting clear before I commit. My mama wouldn’t settle until she found a place she was truly happy with—and she won’t let me settle until that happens either.

Often the Gift Is Not Getting What You Wanted

This past year and a half in Pittsburgh was the most difficult period of my life for reasons that wouldn’t make sense to most. Materially, I was fine throughout. Psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually, I was in a battle pretty much every day. From the outside looking in, you certainly couldn’t tell that much was going on with me. But on the inside, there was a deep and often painful transformation taking place. On the inside, a lot was being triggered, confronted, and ultimately healed.

It seemed like things were getting more and more difficult as my time in the Burgh was coming to an end. About a week and a half ago, my car broke down randomly one morning. I went out to start it, and it wouldn’t turn over. My first thought was that it was the battery, so I took the battery out, walked about two miles down the road to Advance Auto Parts, bought a new battery for $245, put it in my backpack, and then walked two miles back to my apartment with a 50-pound battery literally strapped to my back. I put the new battery in and crossed my fingers, but of course, the car still wouldn’t crank. Now, I’m starting to freak out a bit, mostly because I had to be out of this apartment in less than two weeks, and now I didn’t have a car.

Not having a car is really not the end of the world in and of itself, but I didn’t want to have to come back to my hometown carless because there’s no other way to get around down here, and I couldn’t imagine begging people for rides. So then my options became: either try to find a shop with availability, get my car towed there, and hope they could figure out the issue in time, or bite the bullet and try to find a new car—another time-consuming objective—before I left. For a while, I was leaning toward the new car route, but logistically, it would have been a headache since I was getting ready to leave the state. So I took my next best option and found a mobile mechanic to come out and diagnose the problem. It took him about three hours on Father’s Day, but he eventually figured out the issue. And the good news is that it only took me another $250 to get it fixed.

I was so grateful and relieved to have worked through this issue because I was already getting more and more stressed about all the packing I had to do in the coming weeks. But I wasn’t totally in the clear just yet.

This past Friday, I woke up with the most intense anxiety. I had woken up with anxiety every day for the past week, but Friday it was so bad that it lasted all day. What was crazy about it was that I knew the anxiety I was experiencing wasn’t my own. Sure, moving is a nerve-wracking process, but 1.) I’m pretty in tune with my emotional state, and after my car had gotten fixed, I was feeling pretty chill, and 2.) the anxiety I was experiencing wasn’t the “moving sucks” sort of anxiety; it was the “waiting on life-or-death test results” sort of anxiety. So I was a bit perplexed about why and whose anxiety I was picking up on.

On top of this phantom anxiety, the rest of the day Friday quickly became quite overwhelming because I’d taken my beautiful bike—one of maybe three physical objects I feel emotionally connected to—out to my car to make sure it would fit. And… it did not. No matter how I tried to position it, it just wouldn’t go. I had vastly underestimated how big my bike is and how small my car is. Panic quickly ensued as I rushed to figure out how I could get my bike back home, but none of the options seemed feasible since I was leaving in two days. Defeated, I accepted that I was going to have to sell it and begrudgingly listed it on Facebook Marketplace, highly skeptical it would sell because of how expensive it is.

While doing research for the listing, I discovered that the particular frame of the bike I own has been discontinued, meaning I’d likely never be able to replace it, and this made me super bummed out because its color is one of my favorite things about it. And then, later in the day, I discovered why I’d been feeling so much anxiety. It turns out that a gift I felt like God had promised me, something I felt was aligning with me, was not aligning with me after all. So much anticipation had built up around this gift over the past months. It often felt like it was already here. But then, in the blink of an eye, it wasn’t. And I was just… so confused, thrown off balance, and frustrated with all these problems hitting me at once. I was physically overwhelmed from packing all week, mentally overwhelmed from trying to figure out what to do with my bike, and now emotionally overwhelmed because I felt like God had reneged on a promise. To be honest, for many moments on Friday night, I felt abandoned. Like God had led me to Pittsburgh only to leave me when I needed support the most.

I went to sleep on one of the worst days of my life, hoping that the morning would bring some relief, but it did not. I had to somehow figure out how to continue boxing things up, cleaning, and packing my little Civic with everything I own for the sixth time in my life, with a head full of troubles and a broken heart. For the first half of the day, I really suffered—doing what I had to do to keep things moving forward, but the whole time, I was in my head wrestling with God, trying to understand why I’d been put in this position. It felt almost like I was being punished, but I couldn’t understand why, because I truly have never been more devoted to my path than I had been over the past year and a half.

Somewhere along the way, I figured out how I could fit my bike into my car. Essentially, I had to take some pieces off and pack those separately. Not only that, but I also finally managed to get almost everything I’d planned on keeping into my Civic successfully. There certainly wasn’t much room to spare, but that honestly made me feel more proud and accomplished. I patted myself on the back and commended myself for persevering through adversity to do what I had to do. I really wanted nothing more than to lay on the floor and mope for hours on end after I received that devastating news—but I quite literally did not have the time. I had to keep on movin’.

Shortly after my packing victory, something became super clear to me. God had promised me a gift—they had promised me a “what”—but they hadn’t promised me “how” or in what form that gift would manifest. I had assumed, and because of my assumption, I felt slighted when the gift didn’t appear the way I expected. But the more I thought about it, the clearer it became that I hadn’t missed my gift at all. In fact, this gift I had convinced myself I’d missed had actually already blessed me many times over during my time in Pittsburgh—just not in the form I wanted. And honestly, if it had come in the form I really wanted, I probably would not have grown or transformed in the beautiful way that I have.

Suddenly, a sense of peace and lightness washed over me. A sense of release. I started laughing at myself with a stupid smirk on my face at the absurdity of it all. The absurdity of packing my entire life into my Civic yet again. The absurdity of thinking God wouldn’t keep a promise. The absurdity of even believing for a moment that I was abandoned. I had gone from despair to unbridled happiness in a matter of moments—and only because my perspective shifted, not my circumstances.

About an hour later, my landlord pulled up to walk through the apartment and check for damages. We chatted for a bit, and right as he was getting ready to leave, he said, “Oh yeah, before I forget, I have something for you.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a check for my full security deposit. I was shocked! I’ve never gotten a full security deposit back before, and if you’ve ever rented, you know how rare it is to get the full deposit back—and unheard of to get it back the day you move out. What’s even wilder is that I hadn’t even finished cleaning my apartment yet.

He basically said he didn’t expect to find any issues, so he went ahead and cut the check. He didn’t nickel-and-dime me. I didn’t have to follow up or wait 30 days to get my money back. He had it ready for me, on faith that he’d have no reason to withhold it. And it wasn’t even about the money. I would have had no problem waiting for it. It was about being pleasantly surprised by a gift I wasn’t expecting. In that moment, I felt God smile at me as if to say, “Did you really think I’d forget about you?”

And it reminded me that I’d received a gift the day before too, on what I had labeled as one of the “worst days” of my life. That Friday morning, I’d driven to a local auto shop to get my tires rotated and to get a general checkup to make sure I was good to go for my upcoming road trip. They had my car in the back for at least an hour and a half before they finally called me up to pay. When I got to the register, the guy looked at my paperwork with a confused expression and said, “I don’t think you have any charge.” This confused me too, so I asked, “Are you sure?” He said, “Let me ask my manager.” His manager confirmed that I didn’t owe anything. So I just shrugged my shoulders, grabbed my keys, thanked them, and went on my way.

The moral of the story is this: we receive gifts all the time, but when we’re too caught up in the drama of our stories, we overlook them, fail to appreciate them, or feel abandoned because they don’t manifest exactly how we expected. I was convinced that Saturday and Sunday were going to be just as bad as Friday, but they weren’t. I spent the second half of Saturday extremely happy, with that same silly smirk on my face that came with my revelation. And when I woke up on the floor Sunday morning, that silly smirk was still there.

I had been anticipating having an awful time on my drive back to SC. I was worried that my almost 20-year-old car would break down, leaving me stranded in the middle of nowhere. But not only did my car not break down, it didn’t even break a sweat. And not only was the drive not bad—it was fun. Driving down the bodacious curves of southern Pennsylvania and West Virginia was absolutely beautiful, and Spotify seemingly shuffled to all my favorite songs along the way. I made it back to SC right on time, with absolutely no issues—not even so much as a traffic jam for nine hours straight. It was another pleasant surprise. Another gift that I wasn't expecting.

I have arrived.

It feels like I’m in a staging area after closing out a ten-year cycle in my life before starting the next one. And I’m feeling sooo0 good—way better than I ever could have imagined on Friday. Not only do I not feel abandoned, I feel protected. I feel aligned. I feel at peace. And what’s most surprising is that I’m feeling social! I’ve pretty much been in hermit mode for the past ten years, and it feels like that’s finally coming to an end.

I want to connect with people, and I’m starting with my family. Where I’ll be next isn’t 100% clear yet, but I’m feeling called to check out Chicago, and LA for sure. So I’m going to do that. And wherever I end up, I plan to put down roots for at least a few years—partly because I’m so damn tired of moving, lol, but also because I finally feel ready to fully show up for the community I’ve been wanting to create for so long.

One of my favorite quotes is, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” This past year and a half, and especially the past couple of weeks, I’ve been going through hell. But something inside of me kept encouraging me to keep going. That’s not to say I didn’t take plenty of breaks to shake my fist at the sky, grit my teeth, scream, and/or cry—because I absolutely did. But I always got back up, and that’s why I’m writing this newsletter right now with a renewed sense of hope and a deeper faith than I’ve ever had before.

Life gets incredibly challenging at times, and moving sucks, but we have to keep on moving because life is constantly moving—and if we don’t move with it, we'll surely get left behind.

With love,

Micheal Sinclair 💜