THE “DISRUPTOR” You Need to Know: Say Hello to Shahem McLaurin

A Baltimore-born healer on racism, resistance, and redefining what wellness looks like in our communities.

Before we even hit record, he’s already mid-story do-rag tied tight, black ink tracking across his arm in a transmutation circle straight out of Fullmetal Alchemist. He laughs when I mention it.

“Yeah,” he says, “I’m an anime kid. Always been.”

It fits. Everything about him feels like a remix: clinician with a hood accent he’s learned to hide and reclaim; organizer turned therapist turned online educator; someone who never wanted the title “healer” but keeps being pushed into positions where healing is demanded.

There’s a word his mentor once used, one that stuck:

“You’re a disruptor.”

And whether he was ready or not, life dragged him into that role headfirst.

BALTIMORE MADE ME

Growing up meant summers in Baltimore not the Instagram Charm City, but the real one. Grandparents who believed in raising kids with experiences, not just rules. A city that teaches you survival, heart, and code.

“I loved Baltimore. Still do. My Baltimore ain’t everybody’s Baltimore,” he says. “Everybody has that love/hate with home. Mine wasn’t about trauma, though that was there. It was that you know your city so well, it almost becomes a glorified prison of the past.”

He pauses.

“But it also raised me. It gave me my first understanding of community.”

That understanding wasn’t abstract. He entered the organizing world at 16, helping build a youth program from nine kids to over 400. Cleaning neighborhoods, planting trees, tutoring, mentoring. By nineteen, he’d launched his own youth development initiative.

He never expected therapy to be part of the path.

“I hated the idea of one-on-one work. I wanted macro change. I wanted systems. I wanted the whole block.”

But a mentor saw something else:

“You’re too empathetic not to be in rooms where people need to be held.”

THE ACCIDENTAL THERAPIST

He enrolled in a master’s program for social work to become a better organizer, not a clinician. Never saw himself doing family therapy. Never imagined sitting across from families fighting to stay out of the foster care system he once passed through as a kid.

But the work got in his bones.

“I started seeing families get better, like actually better. Watching a kid who was about to be removed stay home because something finally clicked. I was like, ‘Oh..this isn’t so bad. This matters.’”

Then came the boys’ facility, a secure residential program for young men facing violent charges.

“They didn’t believe I was a therapist. I had a do-rag on,” he laughs. “They were like, ‘Not the silky! No way you the therapist.’ But when they realized I’m from where they’re from… the whole room shifted.”

That was when he understood something:

“Micro work changes the macro. How you heal one person ripples into families, blocks, generations.”

But the turning point..the real pivot — came at NYU, a

nd none of it was pretty.

WHEN NYU SHOWED ITS TEETH

He didn’t go looking for a fight, but the fight found him.

It started with racist comments in class. Casual, violent things said with confidence:

“How can America be racist if Obama was president?”

“I’ve always fantasized about whispering the N-word in a Black man’s ear while I climax…”

A professor doubted only his sources,until he pulled up a CNN article in class.

Classmates debating whether a non-Black student could say the N-word while he sat there.

Then came the incident that broke everything open.

He was in Paris, trying not to miss class. Asked classmates to call him in.

No one responded.

Later, one classmate emailed:

“I didn’t feel comfortable with a Black presence in the classroom while I was presenting.”

He posted the emails.

It went viral.

National outlets picked it up.

NYU went into full-blown PR defense mode.

He suddenly found himself forced into the role of spokesperson, activist, and symbol, a position he never asked for.

“It was isolating. I was burnt out. I didn’t have the community I needed yet. But then Dr. J sat me down.”

The words still anchor him:

“Your existence disrupts their worldview. That’s why they’re reacting like this.

You’re a disruptor. Keep going.”

That sentence changed everything.

It reframed his purpose.

It made him stop hiding.

NONPROFIT GAMES & “GLORIFIED BABYSITTING”

Before entering private practice, he spent years running programs in the nonprofit world. That came with its own violence.

“I’ve seen white-led orgs talk a big game about equity, but they’ll let Black kids do the bare minimum. That’s not love. That’s not development. That’s babysitting.”

But when a white kid showed the same laziness?

“Suddenly it’s a crisis,” he says. “They couldn’t stand seeing one of theirs acting the way they let ours act.”

He and his co-founder refused to lower expectations for Black youth.

“These kids can grow. They can stretch. They’re brilliant. I’m not here to let them waste their own time.”

He started his own program, and suddenly the same organizations that once praised him began treating him like a threat.

“They don’t play about them dollars. Especially when you’re charismatic, effective, and loved by the kids.”

The final straw was when Target donated brand-new items to his agency and the agency shut it down because his platform was too “public-facing.”

“That’s when I realized: these institutions aren’t built for us to innovate. They’re built to contain us.”

DO-RAGS, ANIME, AND UNAPOLOGETIC ALIGNMENT

One of the most powerful themes of his journey is showing up exactly as he is.

That wasn’t always allowed.

“I had a teacher in high school tell me to lose my Baltimore accent if I wanted to be successful”. That shit stuck with me, and not in a good way.

Years later, a job asked if wearing do-rags was “professionally limiting.”

That was my cue to go. A headwrap is professional but a do-rag isn’t? Be serious.

His style, the do-rags, the tattoos, the anime references, the softness mixed with hood energy is intentional, b

ecause authenticity heals.

“Anything stripping you away from who you are is not for you” .

Alignment doesn’t require you to contort, a

nd people noticed.

Clients sought him out precisely because he wasn’t performing respectability.

“Folks said, seeing you helps me feel like I don’t have to become someone else to survive.’ That’s huge to me.”

COMMUNITY AS MEDICINE

If there’s one concept he returns to again and again, it’s community.

Real community, not followers, not likes, not proximity.

People who hold you up when you’re sinking.

“Every time I tried to fight alone, I floundered. When I had community, mentors, peers, friends, I survived.”

Issa Rae said the key to success is networking across, not up.

He lives by that:

I’m not just me. I’m a whole lineage of people holding me up.”

That’s part of why he aligns so naturally with campaigns like Be More Than Good and Everyone Deserves to Be Well.

“To be more than good, you have to be looking beyond yourself. Every door I walk through, I’m keeping wide the fuck open behind me.”

And wellness?

“Wellness is who you surround yourself with. Who wants you to be well. That’s the real protective factor.”

THE NEW FACE OF WELLNESS

If traditional wellness is beige, corporate, sanitized, and quiet…

He is none of that.

He represents a new lane! one where:

the therapist wears a do-rag,

the clinician quotes anime,

the healer is a disruptor,

and the most professional thing in the room is the truth.

He embodies what “everyone deserves to be well” actually looks like when you strip away the buzzwords and center the people.

“I’m first-gen. I’m queer. I’m from Baltimore. I’ve been in foster care. I’ve been pushed out of rooms and dragged into others. Through all of it, I promised myself: I am not closing doors behind me.”

TITLE OF A LIFE

At the end of our conversation, I ask him what he’d title his life if it were a book.

He thinks for a moment.

Smiles.

“The Disruptor.”

And honestly?

There’s no better name.