characteristics of a narcissist woman — 1 investigation

characteristics of a narcissistic woman, said as a single phrase, makes the algorithm tense up and refuse to autocomplete the rest of it. i typed the phrase anyway, slowly. the autocomplete eventually offered me a recipe for a fairly basic chili. the chili was, frankly, more useful than the article.

so here we are. it is 10:48am on a wednesday. i am at the desk, which is the company’s, with the laptop, which is the company’s, writing about a topic which is, in a sense, mine. carla is in the all-hands on the third floor — the one with slides, the one nobody finishes — and i have, by rough estimate, the rest of the morning before someone notices the back of my head is too still.

i should explain where this draft was born, because it was not, technically, born at the desk. it was born in the elevator. i was riding from floor two to floor seven, which is a longer ride than it sounds, and a notification arrived on my phone at exactly the wrong moment — the kind that lands while two strangers in an elevator are pretending not to share a square footage. the notification was, in essence, a person from a previous chapter of my life informing me that someone i used to share a couch with had posted a photograph of a wine glass and a sunset. i looked at the photograph for two and a half floors. i exited the elevator and started taking notes about the characteristics of a narcissist woman, because at that moment, the wine-glass-and-sunset photograph had handed me an outline.

writing this from the desk, post-elevator. carla is in the all-hands on the third floor. i have, technically, the rest of the morning. let’s go.

before we get further: the word characteristics is doing a lot of work here, and i want to handle it carefully. signs is what you write when you are making a list nobody finishes. traits is what you write when you are pretending to be a clinician on a tuesday. characteristics is what you write when you have, after some quiet years, observed a person from close enough to take notes — and then observed a few others, from middle distance, and noticed the same notes. that’s where this is. mid-distance. four years in, one folder later. i’m linking the long version of all this once: the pillar on gaslighting is the entry point if you want the wider topic. you’ll get there from here, but the elevator door has closed and i have notes to file.

CHARACTERISTICS. ARE NOT. INSULTS. THEY ARE. OBSERVATIONS.

characteristics of a narcissist woman, the working list

let me say something clearly, and you can put this on a fridge magnet if you have the budget for fridge magnets, which i don’t. the characteristics of a narcissist woman are not a separate category from the characteristics of a narcissist man. they are the same characteristics, in a different costume. the costume is sometimes warmer. sometimes more apologetic in tone. sometimes wrapped in language about boundaries, by which the speaker means your boundaries, which they have re-arranged.

here is the working list i have, from the elevator notes and the four years and the folder. i am not numbering this list with the energy of a clinician. i am numbering it with the energy of a man who needs a clean structure or he will write 4000 words and never get to a verdict.

one — the calm voice. that is, frankly, the headline. the calmness is the tell. real disagreements have heat. patient denial has a temperature of about sixty-eight degrees fahrenheit and never moves. two — the running idea that she is, slightly, smarter than the room. not loud about it. quiet about it. with the small patient smile a person uses when watching a toddler attempt a stair. three — the temperature of the apartment dropping when she is not the topic of the evening. you’ll feel it before you can name it. four — the way “we” becomes “i” the moment “we” is winning, and reverses the moment “we” is losing. that’s a structural feature. you can set a watch by it.

five — the notification energy. the constant, low-grade, second-screen attention to who is paying attention. the phone is the audience. the audience is non-negotiable. six — the “you wouldn’t get it” sentence, deployed about things you have, in fact, gotten, sometimes professionally. seven — the explanation of your hobby, your job, your weekend, your taste in coffee, back at you, three days after you explained it. eight — the moment you realize, at 11:42pm in a kitchen, with a fork in your hand, that you have been apologizing for a thing you did not do.

that’s the working list. eight items, no diagnosis. i’m not a clinician. i’m a man with an elevator note and a folder. the list is, by design, observational, and you can argue with any of it on a wednesday and i will, possibly, fold.

the elevator where this draft was edited between floors

the elevator is, in my building, slow. it is also mirrored on three sides, which is unkind on a wednesday morning. it gives you, on average, eleven seconds per floor to think. i did the math. eleven seconds is enough for one whole sentence and one half-thought, and that is, frankly, the unit of cognition i have available most days.

between floor two and floor seven — five floors, fifty-five seconds, give or take — i drafted the working list in my head. the notification i mentioned earlier was already cooling. the wine glass photograph was already being filed in the part of the brain that handles small reminders that other people have, by all appearances, sun. between floor four and floor five, the elevator stopped, and a man got on, holding a coffee, looking exhausted in a way i recognized. we did not speak. men in elevators do not speak. that is a different post.

i bring up the elevator because i want to be honest about where these notes come from. i did not gather them in a library. i did not gather them at a clinic. i gathered them in a mirrored box that moves vertically and occasionally pings. the methodology is, in academic terms, weak. in lived terms, it is the only methodology available to a man on company time.

items 1 to 4, the tom-corroborated ones

i had a beer with tom about six months ago — tom, who owns the house i would, in another timeline, also own; tom, with the volvo, with the wife, with the two children whose names i have, for years, been pretending to remember; tom, who has a pension that understands him in a way that no person in my life has understood me. tom, on the topic of the first four items on the list, was, frankly, useful.

tom said, between two pulls on a beer, “the calm voice is the one that gets you. you keep waiting for the shouting. the shouting never comes. by the time you realize the shouting is never coming, three years are gone.” tom does not write blog posts on company time. tom said it in roughly that order. i wrote it down on a napkin. the napkin is, somewhere, in the apartment. probably under the unopened mail pile, which is, this week, leaning at fifteen degrees.

tom owns. i rent. we have agreed, repeatedly, that we are both valid. mine has more naps. his has equity. on the matter of the first four characteristics, however, tom and i are, for once, in alignment, which is rare enough that i am keeping the napkin. the calm voice is one. the quiet smarter-than-the-room energy is two. the temperature drop on sundays is three. the structural we/i reversal is four. tom recognized all four without me explaining them, which means either i am right, or tom and i have been watching the same kind of person from different chairs.

i would put fifty pounds on the first one. tom would put a hundred. tom can afford to put a hundred. that, in itself, is a separate observation about pensions, which i am about to make, briefly, because it is impossible not to. a pension is a faith-based retirement system, and the faith required to believe in mine is the same faith required to believe a microwave will not, eventually, kill itself. i have killed seven. on the matter of pensions, i remain, structurally, unconvinced.

items 5 to 8, the notification-prompted ones

the back half of the list — items five through eight — i did not get from tom. i got those from notifications. the notifications, taken in aggregate, over four years, told me a story i was not, at the time, equipped to read. the wine glass photograph is one example. there are others. i am not going to enumerate them, because the folder on my phone is private and the folder, frankly, is full.

item five — the second-screen attention to applause — i now spot in roughly seven seconds in any room. i don’t claim this as a skill. it is, more accurately, scar tissue. you don’t admire your own scar tissue. you just notice that you can predict the weather with it. item six — the “you wouldn’t get it” sentence — is the easiest one to spot, because it almost always lands the moment you have, in fact, gotten it. the gap between “you wouldn’t” and “i did” is the entire diagnostic window. it lasts about two seconds. you can use those two seconds for anything. i used mine, in 2019, to nod.

item seven — the explanation of your own taste back at you — is the one that always reminds me of an old film. the woman in all about eve performs item seven with surgical precision, and the film is from 1950, which means this characteristic is older than my apartment, my building, and most of my coffee mugs. nothing about this is new. only the wallpaper changes. item eight — the kitchen apology, the fork, the 11:42pm — is the one i don’t want to write about anymore. but it is on the list, and i am not in the business of editing the list to spare my own evenings.

what i am, technically, not doing in this post

i want to be clear about what this post is not. this post is not a list of warning signs. this post is not a checklist you give a friend. this post is not, despite the gendered phrasing in the search bar, an essay about women specifically. this post is, structurally, an essay about characteristics, which are observations, which are different from a checklist, which is a tool, which is different from a verdict, which is a sentence.

i’m including this paragraph because the algorithm wants me to write a checklist post and i am, on a wednesday morning, refusing the algorithm. the algorithm offered me a chili recipe. the chili recipe was kind. but the algorithm does not know what i know, which is that the characteristics of a narcissist woman are not a separate category from the characteristics of a narcissist anything. they are observations of a specific machinery, and the machinery does not check id at the door.

carla just walked past the desk on her way to a different meeting. i minimized this. i think we’re fine. i think i have, by my best estimate, an extra forty minutes if no one looks at the back of my head.

closing pulpit, the characteristics are universal, the gender is a label