example of narcissistic behavior — 1 fairly sure investigation

an example, singular, is what you offer to make a point at a small party where you do not know most of the guests by name. one example is, theoretically, enough. one example, in my own data, is also, sometimes, two years of a life i would have preferred to keep.

so today the topic is the example of narcissistic behavior, which sounds like a multiple-choice question on a test i did not study for, and which, on the wednesday i am writing this, i can answer in eight items, ranked roughly by how often they have ruined a tuesday.

desk, mid-morning, wednesday. carla is on the third floor at the all-hands prep — the warm-up to the warm-up. i have, by my best estimate, an hour before the cursor in the wrong document becomes a problem.

i’d like to say i collected these in a notebook, neatly, with dates. i did not. i collected them in a folder on my phone named “evidence”, with the optimism of a man who thought, at the time, he was joking. the phone is at 23%. the folder is, technically, full. the new microwave — the seventh, by my count — arrived two thursdays ago and reminded me, briefly, that some objects in my life are replaceable. people, less so.

example of narcissistic behavior, the working set (the eight i could write from memory)

the working set is, in this post, eight items. i’m not putting twenty. twenty is a listicle written by someone with an editor. i have, instead, the dave-corroborated four and the chatgpt-screened four, which is the entire taxonomy i can defend in a single morning. the rest, i’m fairly sure, exist in my earlier post on the calm-voice pattern that ran my 2019, which is the post you read when you suspect one example is no longer one.

before i list, two notes. first: a single example is not a verdict. one example is a tuesday. eight examples, in the same person, in eighteen months, is a working set. second: i am not a doctor. a doctor is a man with a job, which i, on a wednesday at a workstation that does not legally authorize me to type the words “narcissistic behavior” into a CMS, am not. with that out of the way.

EIGHT. EXAMPLES. ONE. PERSON. THAT’S. A. PATTERN.

the dmv example, drafted in line, briefly

i drafted this list in line at the dmv. specifically, the dmv that doubles as a post office on the side that smells like toner and patience. i was there for a renewal i had postponed three times, two of which i had told myself i had postponed once. i had ninety minutes in line and a phone at 23% and no airpods that worked simultaneously. so i opened the notes app and started typing.

the dmv is, as a setting, instructive. everyone in line is forced to be a regular person. there are no titles. there is no “i’m important, i should go first”. there is just the number and the chair and the small bag of paperwork. and yet — and yet — even in the dmv line you can see the example. the man two ahead of me argued with the clerk, calmly, that he had brought the document, when he had not brought the document, and when she pointed at the empty folder he said, in the patient tone, “i think there’s been a misunderstanding”. the misunderstanding was the document. the document was not in the folder. the folder was open. that is when i started writing.

between the dmv list and the post-it on the standing desk i sit at, the eight examples below survived three drafts and one second opinion from chatgpt, who, i’m fairly sure, finds my prompts emotionally exhausting.

examples 1 to 4, the dave-corroborated ones (one per ring)

dave, for the unfamiliar, is the friend whose name comes up on the second ring, never the first. dave is in insurance, technically, and owes me three hundred dollars, technically, and laughs at things in nine-minute stretches, which i have timed. dave was the witness for four of these. dave does not claim to be a credentialed observer of the human condition. dave is, however, a man who has been in rooms.

1. the calm correction of a thing you witnessed. you say “you said you’d be home by seven”. they say “i never said seven, i said around seven”. you have the text. the text says seven. the conversation continues as if the text is, somehow, also seven-ish. dave was on the couch the day this happened to me. dave watched. dave said, later, “that’s the part that messes with you”. dave was right.
2. the third-yoga-mat indictment. they criticize a small purchase you made — a yoga mat, in my case, the third one, currently under the couch, possibly evolving — not because the purchase matters, but because criticizing it is a way to keep score. the third yoga mat is a real thing. it has been there since 2023. they brought it up in fights about other rooms.
3. the audience-aware reframe. in front of three of your friends, they recount a story about your own life and get the punchline backwards. nobody at the table corrects them. you don’t correct them either, because correcting them in public is, in their tone, a war crime. dave was at this dinner. dave bit his tongue. dave bought the next round, which is dave’s apology language.
4. the apology that contains a counter-charge. “i’m sorry you felt that way” is, technically, an apology. it is also, in practice, a return mail with your own handwriting on it. an apology that ends with a complaint about your reaction is a memo, not an apology. memos accumulate. apologies, real ones, do not.

examples 5 to 8, the chatgpt-screened ones (one per session)

i ran the back half of the list past chatgpt at one in the afternoon, on the same wednesday, while the dmv ticket was still in my pocket. i did this not because i trust the bot to know my life, but because i wanted to confirm that none of these were just garden-variety annoyances dressed up in a heavier word. the bot, to its credit, told me four of the eight i drafted were, in its phrasing, “common in non-clinical interpersonal friction” and could be removed. i removed them. these four survived.

5. the count-the-friends drift. over twelve months you stop calling two people. then four. then the group chat is muted and you’ve left a thread you were once central to. the drift is not about them. it’s about who you are in proximity to the person, and who you can no longer be in proximity to anyone else. chatgpt phrased this as “social attrition”. i wrote it down on the notes app and, predictably, lost the note.
6. the rule that does not apply to them. rules are for the line, not for them. they cut the line, calmly, with a polite phrase. the polite phrase is the trick. the polite phrase says “i am the kind of person who says polite phrases”, which they believe absolves them of cutting the line. the line knows. the line is keeping score. the line is patient.
7. the database in arguments. in a fight about the dishwasher, a thing you said in 2017 returns, fully formed, with a date attached. that is a database. databases are not built by accident. and a person who keeps a database on you, then opens it on a wednesday, is not arguing — they are auditing. you were not informed of the audit.
8. the pension lecture, with citation. they bring up retirement planning at a dinner party where two people are crying for unrelated reasons, and they tell you, slowly, that a pension is a faith-based retirement system, while implying you have not, perhaps, taken your faith seriously enough. they are not wrong about the line. they are, however, deploying the line as a weapon. that’s the move. the line is fine. the deployment is the example.

that fourth one was tom-adjacent, and i flagged it for the bot precisely because it sounded like something tom would say at a wedding near the dessert table. the bot allowed it through. tom, for the record, is not malignant. tom is just a man with a volvo and an opinion. but the line itself can travel. lines travel. people borrow them. that’s how language works, and how, by extension, examples accrue.

closing pulpit, the examples are abundant, the supply is human

the supply, in my limited experience and in the more reliable experience of the woman with the dmv ticket two ahead of me, is human. examples of narcissistic behavior are everywhere because the source material is everywhere. that is the bad news and, honestly, the freeing news. you are not going to run out of examples. you are also not going to run out of people who are not, when measured carefully, examples — and that is the part to lean into.

the working set above is mine. yours will be different. yours will involve different rooms, different volvos, different dishwashers. but the test, i suspect, is the same: when you list the examples in one sitting, do they belong to the same person? do they form a pattern when laid end to end? if the answer is yes, you do not need a bigger sample. eight is plenty. eight, on a wednesday, was enough for me, and i am not, on most days, an authority on what is enough.

some people will tell you that listing examples is petty. some people are the kind of person the term toxic was designed to describe at long enough range, and they would, of course, prefer the list not to exist. let the list exist. lists are how the brain remembers. the brain, on its own, is, like the seventh microwave, an unreliable narrator after enough use. the list is the receipt. trust the receipt.

my favorite onscreen example of the pattern, while we’re here, is the calm uncle in the long-running show about the radio psychiatrist and his very patient brother, where the calm voice is played for laughs and not, mercifully, for damage. real life uses the calm voice differently.

carla just floated past the row. window swapped to the spreadsheet that has been “in progress” since february. she did not pause. statistically that lands in the okay column.

the dmv ticket, by the way, is still in my pocket. the renewal will be done by friday. the unopened mail pile is leaning at a thirteen-degree angle, which, by the laws of structural anything, is, technically, fine.

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