We need to stop making trauma compete in the Olympics.
This thought hits me whenever I wade into the fraught, exhausting debates about equity. The concept gets so much flack, not because it’s inherently flawed, but because we are all, to some degree, traumatized by the very systems we were born into. We’ve all been handed a unique set of rules — or no rules at all — and told to play the same game.
In these discussions, we often fall into the trap of comparing wounds. “You think that’s bad? I had it worse…” It’s a defensive, painful scramble to have our suffering acknowledged. But this misses the entire point. Suffering isn’t a monolith; it’s a spectrum that impacts every single person differently.
A scar that is a minor inconvenience for one person can be a debilitating injury for another. This doesn’t indicate weakness. It indicates humanity.
The “Glass Cannon” in Real Life
For anyone who has ever picked up a controller, there’s a perfect archetype for this: the Glass Cannon.
In gaming, a Glass Cannon is a character who possesses immense offensive power — capable of dealing devastating damage — but has very little defensive capability or health. They are incredibly strong, but they cannot take many hits. Their strength does not lie in their endurance.
We all know people who are Glass Cannons. The brilliantly creative friend who shatters under criticism. The deeply empathetic individual who absorbs the world’s pain until they are paralyzed by it. They are not weak. They are powerful in their own way, but they were simply not built with the same constitution to withstand the particular hits life throws at them.
Their resilience manifests differently. And that’s okay.
Expanding Our Idea of Who Deserves Help
When we understand that trauma is not a competition but a varied and complex landscape, we can start to have a more honest conversation about support.
Most of us can intuitively agree that a child who grew up in the foster system, without the stability of a permanent family, deserves more of our collective resources — our tax dollars, our social programs, our attention — than a child whose parents provided a safe, loving, and stable home.
This isn’t a controversial statement. It’s an acknowledgement of a foundational deficit.
But what we often fail to see are the other, less visible orphans. What about the child with torturous parents who controlled every aspect of their life, who provided material comfort but strangled their spirit? The child who had a roof over their head but lived in a psychological warzone?
Their suffering is different, but it is no less real. The scars are just on the inside. They, too, deserve our help. They are also starting the race miles behind the starting line, just with different weights chained to their ankles.
The beautiful, radical truth is this: there is enough money and resources to help them all. The problem isn’t scarcity; it’s distribution. The wealth disparity in our country is so vast, so ludicrous, it’s frankly laughable. We are fighting over crumbs while entire banquets are hoarded in plain sight.
The Joker’s Lesson: A Distorted System Breeds Distorted Heroes
This brings me to the Joker.
Nefarious characters like the Joker resonate not because we agree with their methods, but because we understand their origin. They are the logical, if monstrous, endpoint of a distorted system. They are the ones who looked at the rigged game, realized the rules were written for someone else’s benefit, and decided to flip the table entirely.
They play into their devilish desires, projecting a distorted vision that perfectly mirrors our own society’s distorted idea of “success” and “merit.” They are the living, breathing consequence of a world that praises winners and punishes losers without ever asking how the teams were chosen.
The Power of a Wider Lens
So where do we go from here?
It starts with a simple but profound shift: understanding that everyone’s behavior is a product of their experiences and genetics. We see the world through our own personal lens, and when we see someone make a “big mistake,” we’re usually only seeing the final act of a long, complex play.
This isn’t to justify harmful actions, but to understand them. There is almost always more to the story. The parent who was controlling may have been controlled themselves. The bully may have been broken down long before they started breaking others.
When we stop ranking trauma and start recognizing its many forms, we can build an equity that is truly equitable. One that doesn’t ask, “Who suffered more?” but instead asks, “What do you need to heal, to grow, and to finally play the game on a field that is, if not level, at least not tilted at a 90-degree angle?”
It’s about building a world where the Glass Cannons are protected, the orphans of all kinds are nurtured, and no one is driven so far into the margins that the only choice left is to burn the whole thing down.
Originally published on Medium. It lives here now — new essays land in the Journal first.
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