narcissist traits male — 1 explainer, sort of

traits male is the version of the search you type when you do not want to type the longer version, because the longer version means you have already accepted what you suspected. i have already accepted what i suspected. typing the short version anyway, on a wednesday, while the building does what buildings do.

it is 11:51am. carla is on the third floor in a vendor onboarding session that nobody on this floor was warned about. that buys me, by quiet calculation, the rest of the morning. the printer two cubicles over has stopped pretending to print. the coffee is its second pour and already wrong.

writing this from my desk, on company time, in a building i would prefer not to name. the disclaimer about word order comes first because the word order is the whole bait.

i am not going to write about the husband at home. that is a separate desk and a heavier file. i am writing, instead, about the male version i meet between 9 and 6, in fluorescent light, with a lanyard. the boss two doors down. the male coworker in the 7B-equivalent cubicle who sighs at his own reflection in the window when the blinds are at the wrong angle. the cluster pillar on this is the long-form i wrote about gaslighting and other things my ex insists did not happen, in case you want it open in another tab while we do this one.

narcissist traits male: a small, repeating cluster — outsized self-image, allergy to correction, audience-driven volume, slow migration of credit toward the self and blame toward the room — showing up in male coworkers, male bosses, and the occasional male in-law. one trait alone is just a wednesday. four traits, repeating, on a man with power over you, is the thing.

ONE TRAIT. IS. NOT. A VERDICT.

narcissist traits male, the disclaimer about word order

the search bar wanted “narcissist traits male” in that order. that is not how a man speaks. a man speaks “male narcissist traits” or, more honestly, “is my boss the thing i think he is”. the word order is reversed because the algorithm wants the noun first and the qualifier second. i obeyed. i am, on wednesdays, an obedient citizen of the search bar.

the disclaimer is short. one trait is a tuesday. one trait is a man having a bad meeting. narcissist traits male only become useful when they cluster, when they repeat, and when they happen on someone whose signature you need on something. otherwise it is gossip with a thesaurus, and i am, broadly, against gossip with a thesaurus on company time.

the working set i carry is on the back of a receipt. the receipt is in a wallet that does not close. the wallet is on the desk. the desk is the standing desk i bought standing and gave up on after eight days. the seventh microwave is not, on this particular wednesday, relevant, but the seventh microwave is rarely relevant and i mention it anyway because dave keeps the list and dave will ask.

the gym sauna where the heat surfaced this

i don’t go to the gym. i go to the sauna at the gym. the membership covers both. i pay the full fee and i use the cedar room and i sit in there for the recommended time, which i have decided is whatever feels appropriate before my phone overheats in the locker. the cedar room is where the heat surfaced this list. literally. mike was not there. mike does not believe in saunas. mike thinks “showers over 4 minutes are theatre”, which is a separate hot take, and which i don’t entirely disagree with.

last thursday, in the cedar room, two men were talking about a third man. the third man was not in the room. the third man was, by the description, the boss of one of the speakers. the speaker said, in the calm, low voice men use when they are about to commit a small crime against accuracy: “he doesn’t gaslight, he just adjusts.” the other man laughed. i did not laugh. i made a small mental note on the back of an imaginary receipt. he doesn’t gaslight, he just adjusts. that is, in fact, exactly what gaslighting is.

i sat there in the heat for another four minutes — possibly five, time is a suggestion in cedar — and i thought about the_ex. that is a different file, technically closed, factually leaning. the_ex now lives, i believe, with someone who owns a volvo. that volvo is not the point of this post. but the volvo is, as always, present, like a hum.

items 1 to 4, the ex-corroborated ones

these are the four traits the male version shares with the version i lived with for three years. the_ex was not male, but the traits are, the algorithm insists, gendered when the searcher types them this way. so. the four.

1. the self-image is parade-float large, parade-float brittle. the male version inflates it with job title. the boss two doors down begins sentences with “in my role as”, which is a phrase a person uses only when the role is the load-bearing column.
2. criticism is reframed mid-sentence. you bring up a thing he did. by the third sentence the thing has migrated, gently, to a thing the company did, then to a thing the market did, then to a thing the universe did. the universe declined to comment.
3. audience changes the volume. alone in the elevator, normal voice. with a junior in the room, performance voice. with a senior in the room, performance voice modulated for a different ear. three voices. one man.
4. credit migrates one direction, blame the other. the work goes up. the mistake goes down. the email chain, in retrospect, has been edited. there is a phrase: “as i mentioned in my note,” when no such note exists. you know the move.

that is four. those four, on a man with the corner office and a five-year plan that has been a five-year plan since 2018, is enough to ruin a wednesday and possibly the rest of the quarter.

items 5 to 8, the certified-letter ones

these four are the ones i added later, after the heat in the sauna, after the conversation about the third man who “just adjusts”, and after the drawer of certified letters in my apartment did its annual lean. the drawer leans. the letters compound. that is a separate post and an unfunded therapy session.

5. empathy operates on a timer that nobody has set. the male version turns it on for the senior in the room, off for the junior. you can clock the click. it sounds like a microwave finishing.
6. the past is a draft document. what was said in the meeting last quarter has been quietly redrafted to support what is being said now. you have notes. the notes are the receipt. the receipt is in the wallet that does not close.
7. entitlement to seats. the chair at the head of the table. the parking spot. the leg room he did not pay for. on the airplane, on the one trip i took recently, the male version of this sat in row 14 and reclined into my knees for nine hours and apologized to the flight attendant when she asked him to put it up.
8. he cites a movie when the meeting goes long. always the same movie. usually wall street on imdb, the gordon gekko picture, “greed is good”, you’ve heard it. he says it as if he discovered it. he did not discover it. michael douglas discovered it in 1987 and a man named oliver stone wrote it down.

that airplane row 14 was, in retrospect, the cleanest field example i have. an idiot abroad is the same archetype on a different gate, with fewer apologies to the flight attendant. the longer survey of that abroad version sits at the running file on the karl pilkington series, where the species is documented in three seasons.

closing pulpit, the syntax is rough, the traits are smooth

the syntax is rough on this one and i won’t apologize. the traits are smooth. they slide into a man’s day without resistance because the man has been told, since the school photograph in 1991, that he is correct. the four ex-corroborated ones plus the four certified-letter ones gets you to eight, which is one fewer than the textbook count and one more than the number of red envelopes currently leaning in my drawer.

if you want the technical-sounding version of all of this, the cousin file is the definition of malignant narcissism, which is heavier, sadder, and a separate desk. for our wednesday purposes, the eight-item list will do. the list is not a diagnosis. the list is an elevator survival kit.

carla just walked past my desk on the way back from the third floor. she did not look at the screen. that is, depending on the wednesday, either a kindness or a future conversation. i minimized this anyway. the cedar room, by my watch, is unrelated.