symptoms of narcissism — 1 thorough investigation

symptoms is the word doctors use when they want to sound generous about a thing somebody is doing. nothing about what we are describing is, technically, a symptom. a symptom is involuntary, like a sneeze. what we are describing here is selected, every time, from a menu, with care, by a person who can read.

i’m using the word anyway, because the search engines like it and because the word people actually want when they type this is “things he keeps doing on purpose, listed in order, so i can show my sister.” that’s the post. that’s the menu. eight items, two halves, one certified letter on the kitchen counter that i have not opened.

so. the apartment, this morning. me at the kitchen counter, which is the desk on a wednesday before i leave for the actual desk because the dishwasher is making a noise that suggests an opinion. about that letter in a minute.

before we get to the list, the boring disclaimer. i am not a clinician. a clinician is a person with a frame on the wall. i have a fridge magnet shaped like a slice of pizza and an opinion. for the manual version of this you can read my earlier investigation into gaslighting and what your ex insists did not happen, which has the calm-voice section that the rest of this list keeps quoting.

1. symptoms of narcissism, the working list

the term symptoms of narcissism as searched by humans in distress means, almost always, “behavioral patterns that, taken together, suggest the person is not going to wake up one tuesday and apologize.” it is a list of tells, not a diagnosis. you do not stamp a person with this list. you stop volunteering for it.

i tried, years ago, to make this list from memory. i got to four. then i went on a podcast — i did not, i listened to one, on the walk to the bar — and the host had eight. i thought eight was overdoing it. then i sat down at the kitchen counter, with the certified letter on it, and i thought about the ex, and i thought about the algorithm on the dating app that kept recommending people with the exact same energy as the ex, and i thought, you know what, eight is conservative. eight is the floor.

so eight it is. four loud, four that the algorithm picks up before you do. all of them on the menu. none of them sneezes.

also, before we begin, the working definition i’m using lives next door at my earlier investigation into the meaning of malignant narcissism, the version with three extras. that version has the upgrades. this list is the basics. you’ll see the overlap.

2. the certified letter that arrived this morning, briefly

there is a certified letter on the kitchen counter. it arrived yesterday, technically. i was at the office. the building got it. the building put it under my door with the corner bent, which feels personal. it has been on the counter for fourteen hours. i have circled it twice.

i bring it up because the certified letter is, in the personal sense, the thing that finally got me to write this list. some letters you can pretend are coupons. a certified letter is a letter that has hired a witness to confirm you ignored it. it is, by definition, the letter you are not allowed to lose. it is the kind of letter the ex would have opened immediately, while smiling, while telling me i was being dramatic for thinking it might be bad news, while it was, in fact, bad news.

that calm? that’s the data. that’s the menu choice. the choice to be unbothered in the face of a thing that should bother you is one of the loudest tells in the working list. i won’t open the letter on this post. dave is coming by at 6:14pm and dave will, on the second ring of the doorbell, take the letter from me and read it out loud in a voice that is mostly his and partly his uncle’s. that’s how it gets opened. anyway. on with the eight.

3. items 1 to 4, the loud symptoms

these are the four you can spot from across the room without taking off your jacket. these are the ones that make the friends at the wedding nudge you on the way to the dessert table. (the wedding was tom’s. tom is the control group. tom is fine. tom is wrong about beach vacations are punishment with sand, which he disputed at the dessert table while standing in shoes that, on a beach, would fill instantly. tom is, however, not the subject of this list. moving on.)

1. grandiosity in casual conversation. not “i did a thing well.” that’s pride, and pride is fine, pride keeps the lights on. grandiosity is “i am the only person in this room who could have done that thing, and the room is lucky i was here.” grandiosity at the bar is, for some reason, a brunch entrée. it arrives unprompted. it arrives with a side of “and i’ll tell you why.” on a tuesday a man at the bar named mike — mike has a system for taxes, mike has not filed since 2019, mike is not the subject — once said the entire concept of grandiosity is “a guy who introduces himself before anyone asks.” that is the cleanest description of it i have heard. mike was watching a man do it across the room. the man was, at the time, ordering a beer.

2. zero curiosity about your inner life. a regular human, halfway through a dinner, will eventually ask “and how are you doing.” it is a small, dumb, automatic sentence. its absence is a tell. the absence is not rudeness. the absence is structural. they are not avoiding the question. the question does not exist for them. you are scenery. you are good lighting. you are the person who knows the wine list. you can be replaced by any other person who knows the wine list, and they will not, statistically, notice for at least three weeks.

3. the calm denial. the calm denial is the house style of the upgrade kind, but it shows up in the basic kind too, as a starter pack. the calm denial is when they tell you, with the patient voice of a kindergarten teacher, that the thing you are sure happened did not happen. there is no heat. there is no friction. there is no “well, we remember it differently.” there is “you’ve remembered this wrong, and i’m worried about you.” the worry is theatre. the theatre is the tell.

4. the tally. a person who, in a fight about the dishwasher, brings up something you said in 2017 is running a database. ordinary people forget the dumb thing you said in 2017. they forget on purpose. forgetting is a kindness adults extend to other adults. when somebody is keeping the receipts, indexing them, returning them to the surface in the right week — that is not memory. that is a project. project plans are not built by accident.

4. items 5 to 8, the algorithm-detected ones

these four are the ones the algorithm spots before you do. the algorithm, in this case, is the recommendation engine on the dating app i am not currently on, which i am not currently on because the last three people it recommended me had, in their photo grids, the exact silhouette of the ex’s posture at a wedding. the algorithm is, frankly, a better diagnostician than i was for three years. it pattern-matches. it does not have feelings about it. it just keeps offering me the same shape of person and waiting to see if i swipe.

5. need for applause as oxygen. not a wish for applause. a need. the difference is whether the room emptying out causes mild disappointment or visible distress. you can clock this at a wedding around the time the toasts wind down. some people are relieved. some people start arranging the next opportunity for someone to look at them. it’s the arranging that is the symptom. the arranging is constant. the arranging is the third yoga mat of behaviors — always there, never used for what it pretends to be for, slightly judgmental.

6. contempt for ordinary people, expressed as a joke. the cashier is “an idiot.” the waiter is “an idiot.” the man at the dmv is “an idiot.” the joke is that everyone outside this conversation is dumber than the people inside it, and the punchline is delivered with a smile that invites you to laugh, because if you laugh you are, briefly, inside. it is a tiny offer of belonging that costs you a small piece of your taste in people. you take it. then you take it again. then, three months later, your third yoga mat is under the couch and you are quoting them at your friends about a barista you do not know.

7. envy disguised as a compliment. “you’ve gotten so confident lately, it’s almost annoying.” “your apartment is so cute, it’s basically a shoebox.” “you’ve been busy, i can tell, you look tired.” the compliment hands you a small kindness with one hand and removes a fixture from your spine with the other. you do not notice for a minute. you notice on the walk home. you notice the next morning, when you have the sentence in your head and you are slightly less likely to wear the thing they almost-complimented.

8. the disappearing act when accountability arrives. here is the most diagnostic one, the one the algorithm can see and humans usually can’t. when a real, simple, low-stakes opportunity for accountability arrives — “you said you’d be there at seven” — they vanish. they leave the room. they remember a meeting. they reframe the question into “are you saying i am a bad person, because i am hearing that you are saying i am a bad person.” you were not saying that. you were saying it was 9:42pm. they have, in less than thirty seconds, converted a logistical question into an attack on their character, and now you are the one apologizing. that move is so reliable you could set a watch by it. some apps could, in theory, train on it. probably some have.

EIGHT. ITEMS. ON. THE. MENU. NOT. ONE. SNEEZE.

for an unsentimental on-screen tour of these symptoms in motion, the kendall roy character on succession runs through, by my count, six of the eight items in any given episode. the show is funnier than it should be because the writers know the menu and order off it deliberately. it is, on a sad week, a useful diagnostic.

5. closing pulpit, the symptoms are stable and the letters keep coming

so the eight stay on the list. they do not, as a rule, retire. people sometimes get better at hiding them. they rarely stop selecting them off the menu, because the menu is the relationship. the menu is what they ordered. the menu is, frankly, what they enjoy.

what changes, if anything changes, is who is sitting across from them. the friends notice. the friends quietly stop confirming the smaller version of you in the bathroom mirror at the wedding. the algorithm stops surfacing the same silhouette. the certified letters keep coming, but you start opening them, possibly with dave, on the second ring of the doorbell, while someone reads them in a voice that is mostly his.

my voicemail is, for unrelated reasons, full. it has been full for eight months. one of the messages is, statistically, from someone who used to share a couch with me. one of them is from the man who calls, who does not have anything to do with this list. i’m fairly sure. the rest are from numbers i don’t pick up. that’s the news. that’s the wednesday. that’s the menu, in eight items, with the certified letter still on the counter.

also: beach vacations are punishment with sand. tom disagrees. tom is wrong. tom does not, however, present any of the eight, so i will allow him to be wrong about beaches in peace.

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