Dorian Hartwood

It didn’t happen in a boardroom. Not during some grand revelation at a conference or while reading a best-selling leadership book. It happened in the grocery store parking lot, in the middle of a Tuesday. I’d just gotten off a call, closed a deal that once would’ve lit a fire in my chest. But there was no spark. Just the low hum of exhaustion, like an old refrigerator that never turns off.

That moment—the stillness of it, the hollowness—was when I realized something had shifted. I had spent years running after a version...

It started with a glass. A cheap, foggy thing in my mother’s cabinet. I must’ve been nine. I’d just come home from school, still in uniform, still hungry. And I dropped it. It shattered in a way that didn’t just pierce the tile, it pierced her. My mother.

She didn’t yell. Didn’t scold. She inhaled sharply, knelt, and began to sweep the pieces. But something about her silence that day — tight-lipped, trembling — cut deeper than any broken edge. It was the sound of generations not allowed to scream...

I don’t know about you, but every time someone told me “it gets better,” I wanted to punch a wall. Better? What the hell does “better” even mean when you’re knee-deep in a sadness so heavy it feels like you’re carrying another human on your back? Or when you’re smiling at work while your insides feel like they’re bleeding out?

Mental health isn’t a fucking straight line. It’s not “sad” to “better” with a confetti cannon at the finish line. It’s more like walking through a damn minefield — some da...

It starts with something simple. A plastic fork. A gas station receipt. A grocery cart packed with more than we need, filled with food we didn’t grow, wrapped in packaging that will outlive us. And that’s not an accusation. That’s the reality we’ve been handed.

Somewhere along the way, we traded our old knowledge for convenience. We forgot the rhythm of seasons, the sacred hush of forests, the stories the soil used to tell us. We paved the ground our ancestors once walked barefoot. We silenced th...

When Faking It Becomes Fucking Dangerous

You ever fake a smile so long, you forget what a real one feels like?

That’s where this starts.

Not with some corporate buzzword or motivational fluff — but with a quiet, soul-numbing lie: “I’m fine.”

This is for the ones who’ve been faking it so long, you’re not even sure who’s under the mask anymore.

And this isn’t just another “be yourself” pep talk. This is the dirty truth about faking it — and the moment it stops being a survival skill… and starts becoming...