There’s a neighborhood theater only a five minute drive from my house. I went with some friends to the small cinema last Tuesday, when tickets are only five dollars. Built during the golden era of film, it holds the charms of vintage theaters I love so much.

We went to watch a movie about the displacement and economic disparity happening in the very city I live in, The Last Black Man in San Francisco.

The plot follows the efforts of a black man, Jimmie, trying to reclaim his childhood home, a beautiful Victorian house in the Fillmore District of San Francisco.

Towards the end of the film, Jimmie describes a friend he lost during a shooting. He talks about the last words he heard from this man, the meanest words someone has ever told him. But this was also the same man who got into a fight standing up for Jimmie when they were both living in a group home…

“People aren’t one thing.”

And that line hit me so hard.

If you reduce people to one thing, you take away the whole of them.

I’ve dropped plans to stand by my friend in the back of a funeral home as he just stared at the casket from a distance, wondering if he had a right to go up and say his goodbyes. I’ve met two kids on the streets asking for food and spending my lunch with them, making plans to bring them to a children’s museum because they didn’t have parents willing to take them. I’ve brought food to homeless encampments around my neighborhood, taking time to hear their stories, remembering their names for the next time I see them.

I’ve also told my dad I didn’t think he was worth anything but broken promises, so ashamed of the hate I held for him. I’ve yelled so loud at my brother my voice was sore the next few days, a painful reminder of my verbal assault. I’ve slept on the floor of a friend’s place with a giant Costco teddy bear as a pillow because I wasn’t fit to go home after partying – twice, strangely enough. Two different friends with the same taste for giant teddy bears.

I’m not one thing. I have good parts of me, but it doesn’t make me all that good. And I have bad parts of me, but it doesn’t mean I’m bad as a whole.

I need to remember that for myself. I desperately need others to remember that for me. I desperately need to remember that for other people.

People are complex, we can’t be reduced to just one thing. And realizing this one thing helps with the whole idea of grace. For others and for myself.