7 signs of a toxic person — and i’m fairly sure

seven is an oddly specific number for a list of warning signs. seven feels like a magazine landed on it because eight wrapped weird in the layout. i still respect seven. seven is also the number of microwaves currently in my apartment, which is unrelated.

writing this on a thursday from the desk, while carla runs the all-hands prep on the third floor. i have until the second coffee gets cold, which is a unit of time that has served me well.

here is what set this off. i was in a line at the dmv last week — technically the post office annex inside the dmv, which is a building that has decided to be two buildings at once — and a woman two spots ahead of me told the man behind the counter, calmly, that she had absolutely not been called to the wrong window, when both of us could see, in serif font, that she had. the man did not argue. the man stamped a thing. the woman went back to the bench. and i thought: that is a sign. not of her, specifically. of a category. of a kind of person who insists on a thing the room can see is not the thing.

so i started a list. i kept it on the back of a deli receipt for three days. then i moved it to a draft on the desk computer when i realized this was, in fact, the post.

desknote, mid-list. i am aware that the internet has roughly 9,000 of these. i am writing one anyway. there is no licensing body for this.

7 signs of a toxic person, the working list

i want to put the headline up top so the people who skim get what they came for. then i’ll spend the rest of the post explaining why i chose these seven, because the choosing is, frankly, where the work is.

the official list, written down on a deli receipt and then transcribed by a man on company time:

1. the calm denial — they correct your memory in a tone better suited to soothing a horse.
2. the quiet tally — they bring up something you said in 2017 during a conversation about the dishwasher.
3. the friend-thinning — you have, in the last year, stopped calling two people, and you cannot say exactly why.
4. the shower rehearsal — you argue, alone, in steam, with someone who is not present, and you win, briefly, until the kitchen.
5. the muted group chat — you have silenced a thread because every notification raises your shoulders by an inch.
6. the small rewrite — they alter the small facts. who said what. who was where. nothing big enough to fight about. all of them, accumulating.
7. the room temperature — when they walk into the apartment, your laugh gets shorter and your sentences get briefer, and you do not notice this until a friend mentions it.

that is the list. four or more, you are not crazy. you are reading the right post.

the deeper version of this — the longer, slower, three-year version — sits in my long account of the slow-pattern manipulation that ended a relationship, which is the parent post for everything in this neighborhood. read that one if you want the full receipt. read this one if you want the bullet points and a reason to stop arguing with the air.

the dmv line where this draft happened

back to the dmv, because the dmv is the lugar of this post and i am not going to pretend it isn’t.

a dmv line, for those of you who have somehow avoided one — by which i mean tom, who has a dedicated insurance person, a tax person, and a dmv person, all of whom appear to be the same human in different cardigans — is a strip of fluorescent lighting and cracked plastic chairs where time is measured in tickets and small disappointments. you take a number. the number is called. then a slightly later number is called, then a much later number, then your number, then the man behind the counter says “window 3”, and window 3 is, mysteriously, vacant, and you stand at it for eleven minutes while a woman at window 5 explains, to a different man, that she has not been called.

this is, by the way, where i got the second sign on the list. the woman at window 5 was not toxic. the woman at window 5 was tired. but she had the tone. the calm, factual, “this is not happening” tone, while a screen behind her displayed her ticket number in serif font, which the taxman also uses, which is not a coincidence i can prove but which i will continue to bring up until someone takes it seriously.

my phone, in line, kept lighting up with the notification. the notification is, as a category, a citizen of bad timing. it does not show up when you are bored. it shows up when you are mid-thought, mid-step, mid-line, when the receipt is fluttering in your hand and the woman at window 5 is winning her argument with reality. i muted the group chat, hard, in the dmv. mute is a sign too. mute is, in fact, sign 5. you can read it as a coincidence or as evidence that the universe writes my posts for me. either way.

signs 1 to 4, the stefan-detected ones

let me explain stefan. stefan is the man, in any room, who has read four pages of a book and now refers to himself as having “explored the material”. stefan corrects strangers’ wine orders. stefan once told me, at a wedding, that the wine i had ordered was “not really a wine for this hour”. it was a tuesday. it was 8pm. i was at a wedding.

stefan is not toxic. stefan is exhausting. but stefan, as a personality category, is the early-warning system for toxic. stefan-energy plus calm denial plus quiet tally is a different animal. stefan with a project plan is the upgrade you do not want.

signs 1 through 4 — calm denial, quiet tally, friend-thinning, shower rehearsal — are what i call the stefan-detected signs. they are the ones that announce themselves over dinner. you can spot them if you watch for stefan-tone applied to higher-stakes material.

sign 1, the calm denial: a real disagreement runs hot. cold denial is a denial that has been rehearsed. when someone tells you, with the patient face of a kindergarten teacher, that the thing you remember did not happen, and the thing you remember is on a receipt in your other pocket, that is the canary. one canary is a tuesday. five canaries is a coal mine.

sign 2, the quiet tally: in a fight about the dishwasher, they bring up something you said in october 2017. in a fight about the rent, they bring up your sister’s wedding. they are running a database. databases are not built by accident. they are built by a person sitting down on a sunday and entering rows.

sign 3, the friend-thinning: you used to call dave once a week. you have not called dave in four months. you cannot say exactly why. it is not that anyone forbade it. it is that the calls became, somehow, harder to schedule. each one became a small negotiation. eventually you stopped negotiating. dave, for the record, has taken this personally and is owed a return call. he is also owed three hundred dollars, but that is a separate post.

sign 4, the shower rehearsal: you argue, in steam, with someone who is not in the building. you win. you walk into the kitchen. the win evaporates. this is the most embarrassing of the seven because it is the one you do alone. it is also, statistically, the most reliable. the shower argument is a leading indicator. the body is keeping score even when the brain misplaces the score.

signs 5 to 7, the muted-group-chat ones

the back half of the list is the half nobody wants to see in writing. these are the signs you can feel in the apartment but cannot quite name at the dinner table.

sign 5, the muted group chat: you have silenced a thread. maybe two. maybe three, if we are being honest, which we are, on a thursday. the muting is presented to yourself as “i just need to focus right now”. the muting has been ongoing for nine months. focus, in this case, means avoiding a person. which person? good question. that’s the data.

the muted group chat is, in my own apartment, currently sitting at four threads on permanent silent. one of them includes a person who used to be a friend and is now, somehow, an ex’s friend. one of them is a college thread that has aged into a series of slow-motion arguments about politics i would rather not have on a thursday. one of them is family. one of them, embarrassingly, is just dave, who has discovered the voice memo and is using it like a podcast he did not consent to record.

sign 6, the small rewrite: the toxic person does not lie about big things. the toxic person rewrites the small ones. who said the green chair was ugly. who left the door unlocked. who was supposed to call the landlord. each rewrite, in isolation, is a tuesday. seventeen rewrites, in a year, is a project. the small rewrite is harder to spot than the calm denial because the small rewrite has plausible deniability built in. “i must have misremembered” is, by the way, a sentence the toxic person never says about themselves. they say it about you.

sign 7, the room temperature: when they walk in, the apartment cools by three degrees. you do not notice this until a friend, after a dinner, says “is it just me, or are you quieter when they’re around”. the friend has done the diagnostic for you. the friend should be paid. the friend, instead, will get a thank-you text that you will not send, because the calm denial is now indoors with you and you are saving your texting for emergencies.

add up the signs you score on. four or more, sit with that. five or more, sit with that and call dave. seven, you already know. you’ve known for a while. you bought this article in your head three months ago.

closing pulpit, seven is enough, eight is greed

so why seven and not eight. honestly, because seven fit on the deli receipt. eight would have required a second receipt. but also because eight starts to feel like padding. the toilet paper roll goes UNDER. over is for monsters. a sentence i have said at this desk before, on a different topic, but the principle holds: there is a correct number of items in a list, and adding one more, just to fill out the layout, is the kind of thinking that ruins lists and bathrooms in equal measure.

seven is enough. seven is, frankly, more than enough. if the person in your life is racking up four of these on a regular tuesday, you do not need an eighth sign. you have a pattern. patterns do not need additional confirmation.

i’d like to say i’m an expert on this, and not just because of a memorable performance by gene hackman in the royal tenenbaums as a man whose entire household kept a quiet tally on him for years. i’d like to say it. i can’t. i’m a guy at a desk. but i have, by the appropriate count, given the seventh microwave its own outlet. i have, on the wall — the digital wall i keep, because the apartment building forbids actual wall art beyond a single approved frame size — a running collection of insults that strangers and an ex have lobbed my way over the years. the wall of insults, as i have started calling it, is in some ways the negative version of this list. it is the things people called me when they were in the calm-denial phase. it is, on a thursday, oddly clarifying. you can look at the wall and recognize, retroactively, which entries came from people who were running a project plan.

i am not going to share the wall. it has bad lighting. but the wall, like this list, is what an investigation looks like when the only evidence is everyday weather.

carla just walked past the desk. the cursor is now in a budget spreadsheet, allegedly. statistically, that is the okay column.

the dmv line resolved itself, by the way. the woman at window 5 got her stamp eventually. the man behind the counter never raised his voice. the fluorescent lights kept doing their fluorescent thing. i left with a piece of paper i did not need but had paid for, and i went back to the desk, where the receipt with the seven signs on the back was already, in some sense, this post.

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