Dorian Hartwood

There was always a strange comfort in the bathroom stall. Not the act of using it, but just sitting there. Locked in. Alone. I used to fake stomach aches just to escape lunch. That fifteen minutes of quiet solitude? Way better than the clatter of trays and forced conversation I never quite knew how to navigate.

I was weird. Not eccentric or quirky in a cool, Zooey-Deschanel-in-an-indie-film way. Just weird. Reserved. Shy. The kind of kid who got invited to group projects only because the teacher...

Let me start with the pile.

The one on your chair. Or in the backseat. Or jammed in that junk drawer you haven’t opened in months. It’s not just clutter — it’s a map. Of how we buy, toss, repeat. A quiet monument to convenience disguised as progress.

That pile didn’t show up overnight. It grew, quietly, with every late-night impulse buy, every “treat yourself” scroll, every cheap thing made somewhere far away by someone paid barely enough to live.

And that’s the fucking problem.

But this isn’t about...

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...