narcissistic pd symptoms — 1 investigation

pd is the shorthand the internet uses to be polite about it. shorthand is fine for grocery lists. it does not work for the man who tells you, with his whole face, that the chair you are currently sitting in is not there.

so. narcissistic pd symptoms. that’s the search you typed. that’s the phrase that brought you, on a tuesday morning, to a website written from a desk in a building i would prefer not to name. a polite phrase. a clinical phrase. a phrase that looks like it should arrive with a footnote and a calm reassuring voice. it does not. it arrives, mostly, with a story you did not want to tell.

writing this from the desk. carla is on the third floor doing the all-hands prep — the meeting before the meeting before the meeting. i have, at a generous estimate, ninety minutes before someone wonders why the cursor on this document hasn’t moved.

1. narcissistic pd symptoms, the disclaimer about the abbreviation

let me get the abbreviation thing out of the way before we go further, because it has been bothering me since approximately 9:14am.

“pd” stands for personality disorder. the internet uses pd because the internet has a word limit and a tasteful instinct. fine. i’m not going to argue with the internet, it has bigger fish. but the abbreviation does a thing i don’t love, which is that it shrinks the thing it names. it makes narcissistic pd symptoms sound like a category of allergy you might develop in autumn. it sounds like something you’d get a cream for.

it is not that. it is, on the receiving end of one, the patient calm voice telling you, on a wednesday, that the green chair you helped carry to the dumpster has always been in the living room. it is, in my earlier post on the gaslighting pattern from a relationship that ended in 2019, the through-line of an entire three-year period of my life i’d rather not litigate again.

so when you see the abbreviation, mentally expand it. that’s all i’m asking. expand it the way you’d expand any word a doctor wrote on a chart in serif font. the taxman sends letters in serif font. that is the tonal register we want. not “minor seasonal complaint”. more like “letter you put on the kitchen counter for two weeks before opening”.

i should not be writing this from work. i am aware of how that sounds. but the desk is here, the morning is here, and the phrase is here on the screen — and the alternative is opening the spreadsheet i’m supposed to be in, which i won’t.

2. the landlord example, briefly, with rent attached

i want to give you one small example before the list, because lists without examples are how the internet trains you to recognize the wrong things in the wrong order. a list with one example sticks. that’s the rule. i’m fairly sure there is a study on this, possibly in a serious magazine, and if there isn’t, there should be.

my landlord is, in the technical sense, not a narcissist. my landlord is a man who has not painted the hallway since 2017 and explains, every march, that the painting is “scheduled”. it has been scheduled for, by my last count, four marches. but my landlord is useful here for one reason: he does, in miniature, the small move that the bigger pattern does in industrial scale.

example. the rent went up in january. i emailed him about the timing. he replied, on a sunday at 10:47pm, that the rent had “always been” the new amount, that i must be looking at an old version of my own lease, and that he was, in fact, doing me a favor by not raising it sooner. i had the lease. i had the bank statement. i had the email from december where he wrote the old number. he did not deny those existed. he simply said, with the tone, that they were not the relevant documents. there were, apparently, other documents, in a folder he could not, at this time, locate.

that is the calm voice. that is the tone. one sunday email is a sunday email. eleven sunday emails over four years, on different topics, all with the same tone — that’s the version that narcissistic pd symptoms rhyme with, in the part of the brain that keeps receipts.

i did not, for the record, win the email. the rent is still up. but i learned the move. you learn the move once and then you see it on the bus.

3. items 1 to 5, the textbook ones

so. items. these are the ones the looking-it-up exercise will return on the first page of any search you run. i write them in my own words because i do not, on this site, copy from the manual they reference on the shows i watch. but the bones are the bones. there’s no rebranding to do here.

1. grandiosity. a confident sense of one’s own significance that does not, on inspection, match the available evidence. the grand version of this is the linkedin post in the third person. the small version is the man who corrects, in a meeting on a wednesday, an industry term he himself was using wrong on the tuesday. note: confidence is not the symptom. the symptom is grandiosity that does not survive a challenge. it inflates and then it punishes you for being a pin.
2. need for admiration. a steady drip of approval is required to keep the structure standing. the same way some homes need humidifiers. you can spot this one because the conversation, no matter where it begins, returns, by gravity, to a story about how this person was right about a thing some months ago. the gravity is the symptom. one story is a story. the gravity is the symptom.
3. low empathy. not the absence of feeling — that’s a different category and not what we’re talking about. low empathy is the inability, or the refusal, to enter the inner life of someone else for long enough to understand what they’re saying. you tell them about a bad week. they listen for forty seconds and then tell you about a worse week of theirs from 2019. the worse week is, on inspection, not worse. it is just theirs.
4. exploitative habits. arrangements with this person tend to tilt. money, time, attention. you find yourself doing favors that get returned, when they do, with a comment about how lucky you are to have been given the chance. you do not, in healthy arrangements, count the favors. with this one, you start a tally without meaning to.
5. fragile pride that flips to anger. a small contradiction — your phone said the meeting was at three, theirs said two-thirty — produces, immediately, a disproportionate response. the size of the response, relative to the size of the contradiction, is the symptom. healthy pride bruises. this version cracks, and the crack reaches you.

4. items 6 to 9, the apartment ones

these next ones are the symptoms i’d put in the second tier of any list, because they don’t show up in the textbook bullet but they show up, reliably, in the apartment. and the apartment is, in this newsletter, where the actual evidence lives. the textbook is fine. the apartment is the lab.

6. the calm rewriting. small facts in the shared kitchen get edited. the green chair was always in the trash. the green chair was always in the living room. you said you wanted thai. you never said thai. the calmness of the edit is the tell. real disagreements have heat. these don’t. they have the temperature of a hallway where the painting has been “scheduled” since 2017.
7. the tally on you, none on them. in arguments, things you said in 2017 are admissible. things they said last tuesday are not. a database is being maintained, on you, in real time. they have no comparable database on themselves. the asymmetry is the symptom. one-sided record-keeping is the structural feature, in the same way the third yoga mat is, structurally, a permanent feature of my apartment now even though i bought it for thirty days of use in 2023.
8. your friends keep going quiet. not all at once. one at a time, like lights in a building at night. the friends don’t tell you they’re worried until later — three cafés later, on a wednesday, after wine — and by then you’ve already stopped mentioning the thing you used to mention every dinner. the quietness is the symptom. you didn’t make it. it arrived. you noticed when one of them, gently, said “are you okay” and meant it.
9. persistent low-grade paranoia in their version of every story. every story has a villain. the villain is somebody else. the boss. the neighbor. the cousin who, twelve years ago, did the thing. you start to notice that the cast of villains, across all the stories, is not the same cast — but the role is. the role is the symptom. one bad cousin is one bad cousin. a recurring open casting call for villain is structural.

NINE. SYMPTOMS. NINE. RECEIPTS. ONE. PATTERN.

i have left number ten and onward off this list because by the time you have nine of these in one room you do not need a number ten. the room has, in the language i have been using since the unopened mail pile started leaning on the kitchen counter, told you what it is.

and yes — i am aware that “told you what it is” sounds like the kind of phrase a man at the bar would say after his fourth drink. mike has not filed his taxes since 2019, and on this, mike would still nod. mike’s nod is, in matters like this, more reliable than the podcast.

for a screen reference of the pattern, the niles crane character on frasier — refined, vain, a man who turns small slights into long monologues — is the gentle, comedic version. take the comedy out, leave the architecture, and you have the room i am describing.

one quick adjacency before the closing pulpit, because the listicle format does not give me a clean home for it: not every person who calmly rewrites a fact is dangerous. some people are just a comfortable liar of the casual everyday variety, the type who fibs about the score of last night’s game and then doubles down. a casual liar is annoying. a casual liar is not the same animal. the difference is whether the lying is aimed. the casual liar is shooting at no target. the version we are listing today, the version that produces narcissistic pd symptoms in the dictionary sense, has a target, and the target, somehow, keeps being you.

5. closing pulpit — the abbreviation hides the diagnosis

carla just floated past the desk on the way to the printer. window minimized. no eye contact. statistically the safe outcome. probably.

the unopened mail pile, here at the apartment, has by my reckoning grown another two envelopes since sunday. one of them is, i think, from the building management, regarding the painting that is “scheduled”. one of them, more probably, is from the man who calls, who has not been heard from on the voicemail because the voicemail has been at capacity since approximately august, and i intend to keep it that way. i’ll get to the pile. tomorrow, or the next tomorrow.

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