12 traits of a narcissist — and i’m fairly sure

twelve traits is too many to memorize at once and exactly the right number to recognize a face you wish you had not recognized back in 2019. i recognized one of the twelve at the time. i recognize four of the twelve now. that math is going the wrong direction.

desk on a wednesday at 10:14am. carla is upstairs at the all-hands prep — the meeting that exists to schedule another meeting. i have, optimistically, ninety-five minutes before someone wonders why this window is open.

so. 12 traits of a narcissist, drafted today on a digital fridge i keep on a hidden tab, in between two visits from a landlord who wants to “swing by about the radiator” and a third visit i can already see coming. the radiator is fine. the radiator has always been fine. the landlord has a different agenda, and we’ll get to it.

the digital fridge is a tab i keep open. it is named “fridge” because that is where, in another life, i would post things i was working on. in this life it is a browser tab and the magnets are bookmarks. the metaphor is doing a lot of work today.

i started this list after re-reading my earlier post on the gaslighting pattern from a relationship that ended in 2019. the gaslighting post was about one technique. this post is about the operating system that runs the technique. one is the symptom. the other is the catalog. catalogs are, on a wednesday, what i can do.

TWELVE. IS. NOT. A. CASUAL. NUMBER.

1. 12 traits of a narcissist, the working list

i’d like to say i compiled this list from a textbook. i did not. i compiled it from a podcast a man at the bar named mike was listening to one tuesday, three articles i half-read on the train, and four years of trying to translate a folder on my phone named “evidence”. mike has a system for taxes. mike has not filed since 2019. on the subject of taxes mike is unreliable; on the subject of recognizing a pattern in another person’s behavior, mike is, frankly, a regional asset.

the working list, drafted on the fridge tab while the landlord was, theoretically, on his way up, came out in this order:

1. grandiosity — the conviction that the room exists to register them.
2. entitlement — the assumption that the rule is for the rest of us.
3. low empathy — not no empathy, just a thin slice of it, applied selectively.
4. exploitation — the relationship is a resource, you are the resource.
5. envy — they want what you have and resent that you have it.
6. attention-seeking — silence is, to them, a kind of injury.
7. manipulation — small adjustments, applied steadily, until you live somewhere else mentally.
8. defensiveness — every observation is an attack, every attack is unfair.
9. projection — the things they accuse you of are usually a copy of their own paperwork.
10. contempt — the faint smile when you describe something you care about.
11. denial of accountability — the apology that contains no apology.
12. the calm voice — the one that arrives, on a wednesday, to inform you that you have, again, remembered things wrong.

twelve. that is the number. twelve is, i’m fairly sure, six too many. we’ll come back to that.

2. the digital fridge where i posted these for review

the digital fridge is, technically, a private tab. a real fridge is where you put a child’s drawing or a postcard from a sister who moved to portland. my fridge is empty. there is a magnet on my actual fridge that says “live laugh love” — i did not buy it, it came with the apartment, i refuse to remove it on principle. the digital fridge replaces the function. i post drafts there. i look at them later. i pretend that constitutes editing.

this is, in the loosest possible sense, my filing system. it is also where i reread the post about being an idiot in a useful sense, on the days when i need a reminder that admitting you don’t know is, occasionally, the smarter move. that post argued that the word idiot, used about yourself, is a discount on most of the world’s nonsense. the irony of putting an idiot’s diagnostic list on a fridge that doesn’t exist is not lost on me. the irony is, in fact, the point.

between drafting items 1 to 6, the landlord buzzed. he wanted to talk about the radiator. the radiator works. the radiator has worked since february. the landlord, i suspect, wants to discuss something else, and he uses radiators the way a narcissist uses a calm voice — as a vehicle for the thing underneath.

3. items 1 to 6, drafted while waiting on the landlord

1. grandiosity. the regular kind is loud. the dangerous kind is quiet — the person who assumes, at a dinner table, that everyone has already adjusted their schedule to accommodate them, and is mildly puzzled when they have not. grandiosity is not always volume. sometimes it is posture. sometimes it is the way they sit down without looking at the seat.

2. entitlement. entitlement is grandiosity with paperwork. they believe they are owed. by you. by the room. by the country. the proof is rarely produced because, in their view, the proof is self-evident. arguing with entitlement is like arguing with weather.

3. low empathy. low empathy is the trait that gets misdiagnosed most often, because most people, when tired, look like they have low empathy. the difference is consistency. a tired friend forgets to ask how you’re doing on a wednesday and remembers on saturday. a person low on empathy never remembers to ask, and when prompted, asks with the voice you use to read a menu.

4. exploitation. the relationship has a use. you may not have noticed the use because the use is comfortable to them and inconvenient to you, in a way you have been trained to call “compromise”. the simplest test: when the use ends, does the relationship continue? often it does not.

5. envy. envy in this catalog is not coveting your apartment. it is resenting your evening. it is the friend who can’t be happy for you on the night of, even though the night of is the only night that matters.

6. attention-seeking. not the open kind, where they post selfies. the closed kind, where they go quiet at the dinner so that everyone, by minute three, has to ask what’s wrong. they are not asking for attention. they are arranging the chairs so that attention has nowhere else to sit.

the landlord came up. the radiator was discussed. the radiator was, for the third time this year, fine. he did not raise the rent. he did, however, say “we should probably chat about something soon”, which is the conversational equivalent of a red envelope in the unopened mail pile.

4. items 7 to 12, drafted after the landlord left

7. manipulation. manipulation is small adjustments applied over time. the wrong word in front of your friends, twice. the favor requested at the moment you cannot refuse it. the schedule rearranged to require your apology. it is not dramatic. that is precisely why it works.

8. defensiveness. defensiveness with this profile is preemptive. you have not yet brought it up. they are already explaining why bringing it up was unfair. the rebuttal is in the room before the question is. that is rehearsal. rehearsal is data.

9. projection. the accusations they reserve for you are, in my limited and sad experience, a transcript of their own behavior. the partner accusing you of distance is, often, on a different floor of their own life. the friend accusing you of competitiveness has, in their pocket, a tally. you are reading their diary out loud and they are calling it your handwriting.

10. contempt. contempt is the half-smile during the story you cared about telling. it is the small breath out before the response. you can hear contempt before you can describe it. by the time you can describe it, it has been there for months.

11. denial of accountability. the apology that is not an apology. the “i’m sorry you feel that way”. the “i’m sorry it landed wrong”. the apology that puts the receipt in your pocket and the credit in theirs. an apology either includes the action repaired or it isn’t an apology — it’s a press release.

12. the calm voice. the calm voice is the trait that, in retrospect, lets the other eleven travel. the calm voice says “you’ve remembered this incorrectly” while watching to see if you will, in fact, remember it incorrectly the next time. the calm voice keeps a tally. the calm voice is, in the original 1944 film about a husband and a missing brooch, the entire genre. it is also, on a wednesday in this apartment, what i remember most clearly about a person who is, last i heard, with someone who owns a volvo.

5. closing pulpit, twelve is too many, six is the working number

twelve is too many. i said it at the top and i’ll say it here. you will not, on a wednesday, have time to run a twelve-point audit on a person whose voice has just told you, calmly, that you remembered the wrong year. you will have time for six. maybe four if the wedding is starting.

the six i’d actually keep, if i had to fit them on the fridge:

• the calm voice during disagreements. the temperature is the tell.
• the apology that doesn’t repair anything. the press release.
• the friends you’ve stopped calling. count them. it is a number, not a feeling.
• the smaller version of you in the room. if you have shrunk, that is data.
• the tally. if they bring up something from 2017 in a fight about the dishwasher, there is a database.
• the empty middle. if every story has a villain and the villain is never them, the middle of the story is the missing chapter.

those six fit on a tab. those six fit on a fridge. those six, frankly, fit on a post-it stuck to the standing desk i sit at, which is a sitting desk i bought standing and gave up on after eight days. anything beyond six is, on most weeks, performance.

which brings me to mike’s hot take, the one i have been avoiding because it is, on this topic, almost too on-the-nose. mike says “every meeting could be a 3-line email”. mike said it last tuesday, with the tired authority of a man who has not opened his own mail since february. and the reason it applies here, against my will, is that this entire diagnostic exercise — the twelve, the six, the catalog on the digital fridge, the landlord interrupting for a radiator that works — could be a 3-line email. are you smaller. are they calmer. do their apologies repair anything. if you answer “yes, yes, no”, you have your answer.

mike, on this, was right. mike is also wrong about almost everything else. but on the meeting, on the email, on the principle that brevity is a kind of mercy — mike is in the right cabinet of my limited filing system.

i did not believe him for three years. i believe him now. that is roughly the speed at which i learn things. the seventh microwave is, by the way, working fine. the third yoga mat is still under the couch from 2023, possibly evolving into a small civilization with its own opinions about parsley. neither of those facts is relevant. neither, in fairness, is the radiator.

carla glided past the desk. she did not stop. statistically that lands in the okay column, by which i mean she didn’t say my name, which is, in this office, the only metric that matters.

the landlord, before he left, said the radiator visit “wasn’t really about the radiator”. i said “i know”. he looked at me, briefly, the way a person looks at a dog who has unexpectedly understood the word “vet”. then he left, gently, the way a man leaves when he has saved the actual conversation for next week. next week, on the fridge tab, will have its own draft. that draft will not be twelve traits. that draft will be one rent, and how to negotiate it on a thursday with a calm voice of my own.

↑