It's never just one thing.

We tell ourselves stories about single moments, isolated incidents, the one bad thing that happened. But trauma doesn't work that way. It cascades.

An RCMP member stood up and described a line of duty shooting. Not the moment of violence itself, but what came after. The silence from leadership. The bureaucratic shuffle. The people in the "white shirts" who suddenly became strangers when support was needed most.

Their words were simple but devastating: the lack of support was more damaging than the shooting itself.

This is moral injury. And it's time we understood what it's really costing

Exposure to someone else’s trauma can be traumatizing in itself.

The weight of other people's worst moments can crush the helper just as surely as it crushed the person who lived through it.

But we also get to see people at their grittiest, resilient best.

Most people don't want a yard sale.

They don't want to confront the unused exercise equipment, the ill-fitting clothes, the forgotten hobbies, or the gifts they never truly wanted. They don't want to answer the unspoken question: "Why did you keep all this for so long?"

But yard sales happen for a reason. They create space. They generate possibility. They force us to confront what we've been carrying and decide what's worth keeping.