To label someone is to reduce a living, changing person to a single word. Sociologists call this labelling theory: once a person is tagged “deviant”, “difficult” or “a failure”, others respond to the label rather than the person - and the person may come to live up to it. The words are ours; the idea comes from Eckhart Tolle, who writes that reducing another person to a concept is already a form of violence. The line is deliberately strong. The violence here is not physical but conceptual - the quiet force of closing down someone’s possibilities. It asks us to notice how quickly we categorise others and ourselves, and to leave room to be surprised.