The mind goes to dark places sometimes.

Stories we write as journalists are not always happy ones. Sometimes, the stories are about violence or hatred and the damage that does to human beings.

Sometimes, they are about someone’s distress.

Reporters are supposed to shrug it all off and do something else.

My colleagues and I cannot always do that.

If you get to know a place, really know it as community journalists in our company do, you are introduced to the pain in those communities.

It is part of our job. We see people who have experienced trauma.

You ask your questions quietly. You treat people you interview as human beings. You imagine yourself in their place.

Sometimes, it costs you something – something very small compared to the yawning loss or hurt some people we meet are feeling, but something.

In January, four people died in an East Toronto house fire, and several others were hurt. When my colleague Joanna Lavoie arrived, neighbours wanted to talk to her; they already knew her.

But the story stayed with her. Lavoie thinks about it when she passes the torn-down house.

“There's a trust that community journalists have," she says about such stories, "but it can also be difficult because people you've come to know over the years are really hurting.”

When the Danforth shooting happened in 2018, Lavoie experienced it as both a reporter and a member of the community.

She carries difficult memories from her job. I have mine from covering Scarborough.

I think of a quiet man shot on a street as his daughter played nearby, a family deported to a dangerous place their son had never seen, a sister remembering her murdered brother who liked designing websites and driving trucks.

And a father who may never find the driver who hit his daughter and drove away.

I think these stories stick to me because they are unresolved, and because they call out for justice I cannot give.

Driving through Scarborough – something I have not done much through this pandemic – I have remembered tragedies I never wrote about.

A woman burned in that parking lot. A man was shot by police there after he got off a bus.

I didn’t see these things happen. I don’t even live with circumstances allowing me to understand them fully.

But somehow, I carry tiny pieces of them. Violence remains behind.

In this year and a half when so many of us were reeling with feelings of isolation and loss, I spoke to relatives of people in nursing homes.

Some lost one or both parents. Some looked in through windows as outbreaks took lives.

When I pass these nursing homes, or think about them, I feel the shadow of grief.

Never, though, do I question why I wrote those stories. If anything, we needed more.

We are here to listen, be part of our communities.

Part of their traumas, we are also part of their joys. We hope to bring you more of that now.