The harder we fall

Whenever I minimize people to a black-and-white comment (What a jerk! What a saint! What a knockout!), I turn the polychromatic into the monochromatic and confuse the snapshot with the big picture. I must remind myself that we are far too colorful to be captured like this, even when doing so makes people easier to accept or dismiss. I also need to refrain from applying this thinking back on myself: At any given time, I am a jerk, a saint, and—having never been a knockout—fat, bald and repulsive. Or so I would have me believe.