grandiosity narcissism — 1 fairly sure investigation

grandiosity is the word for the way some people enter a room as though they have been billed for it. i have been around three of these. one of them was my landlord. one was a date. the third reads the news on tv.

i am writing this from a desk that is, on a wednesday at 3:14pm, technically mine until lunch. carla is on the third floor at a budget training nobody asked for. i have, by a polite read of the calendar, the rest of the morning, which is enough time to write a list and not enough time to live the list. the list is what this post is. the list is also, in places, a confession.

the notification on my phone went off at 9:43am with a name i have not opened in eight months. that’s the man who calls. i did not pick up. the voicemail count, last i checked, is full. i am, on this matter, the wrong reviewer.

this is a longtail post about grandiosity narcissism, and by longtail i mean i’m going to walk through a working set, mention my mother’s house in passing, contrast myself with tom, and end with five signs and a verdict. the broader pattern, the gaslighting and other things my ex insists never happened, is the pillar i’d send you to first if you wanted the architecture. this post is a single floor of that building.

grandiosity narcissism: a working pattern where a person performs scale they have not earned — speaks as though pre-billed for the room, treats their preferences as policy, treats your time as theirs to schedule, and treats every minor disagreement as a small constitutional crisis. observable in landlords, dates, anchors, and, on bad mornings, in me.

grandiosity narcissism, the working set (and why i keep one)

i keep a working set because the alternative is to remember things accurately, which i cannot do, and to argue from feelings, which the calm denier always wins. so i keep a list. the list lives, partly, on a phone, and partly, on the standing desk at which i, as established elsewhere, sit. the post-it is yellow. the pen is the cheap one. the expensive pen is, by long-standing policy, for tom.

three entries in the working set today, all from the cold open: the landlord, the date, the anchor. each one of them shares the same opening move, which is the entrance. they enter as though billed. they sit as though seated by staff. they begin speaking as though continuing an earlier sentence, the earlier sentence being one only they remember, the earlier sentence being, frankly, fictional.

the landlord came up to fix nothing in the kitchen for forty minutes. he stood by the sink. he commented on the angle of the window. he charged me, the next month, for the visit. the date ordered for both of us in 2019 and corrected the waiter’s pronunciation of a wine the waiter had not pronounced. the anchor reads the news with the cadence of a man who, off-air, expects you to pay attention to him for reasons that do not appear on the teleprompter. these are not, individually, crimes. they are, collectively, a pattern. the pattern is the topic.

the moms house, briefly mentioned, off-page

my mother’s house is not in this post per se. my mother’s house is the contrast room. my mother’s house has, on the kitchen counter, a stack of unopened mail that is mine, technically, because i forwarded it there in 2022 and never collected it. my mother does not perform. my mother does not enter. my mother arrives. arrival is the opposite of performance. arrival is the thing the grandiose cannot do because arrival assumes the room was already there before you got to it.

she called on a sunday last month. she asked, in the tone she has, whether i had paid the thing she does not name. i said i had. i had not. she said okay. she said it the way a doctor says okay when the chart does not match the appointment. a doctor, by the way, is the only person in my life who can produce a calm that is not grandiosity, because the doctor’s calm is paid for and the doctor’s calm is, on the bill, time. the grandiose man’s calm is, on the bill, free, which is why it costs you so much.

the unopened mail pile, last counted, has nine red ones. red ones are not in this post either. red ones are a separate file. the investigation is the red ones file. the investigation does not, technically, get opened. the investigation is, technically, the post-it for a post i have not written.

tom would have a clinical view, i have grandiose-adjacent thoughts

tom is not in the post per se. tom is, again, the contrast group. tom owns a house. tom has a wife. tom drives a volvo with seats that adjust in fourteen ways. tom has a pension that, when described, makes me feel like a man auditing a stranger’s quarterly report at 11:23am instead of a man on a list of things to do, a man who has killed seven microwaves and is operating, currently, on the eighth, the seventh microwave being the one i killed on a tuesday i’d rather not revisit on company time. tom owns, i rent, the obligation between us is a low hum that neither of us names.

i ran the cold open by tom on a phone call i did not, technically, want to have. tom said: “the landlord one is just a landlord.” tom is wrong on this. landlords are not, by definition, grandiose. some landlords are organized. some landlords are quiet. mine performs scale he does not own, which is the technical signature. tom, who has met two landlords in his life because he has owned a house for eleven years, is in no position to grade the field. but i let him talk. i’m a polite renter.

here is the grandiose-adjacent thought i had after the call. tom does not perform. tom does not narrate. tom does not enter. tom, in the calmest voice imaginable, owns. ownership is, in his telling, a frame of mind. it is also, in the literature i’m fairly sure exists, a paid subscription with a thirty-year contract. the rest of us perform a calm we do not own. the calm is a rental. the lease is monthly. the landlord is, on this point, the metaphor.

i have, on bad mornings, performed a low-grade version of the same trick. i have entered the coffee shop on a tuesday and ordered as though the order matters to anyone but me. that is grandiose-adjacent. that is not the disease. that is a symptom that visits and leaves. tom does not visit. tom commutes. there is a difference. the gordon gekko character in wall street commutes. he does not visit. that is the upgrade.

signs 1 to 5, the grandiose ones

five signs of grandiosity narcissism, on a workday, observable from a desk, written in a tone that admits the writer is, in two of them, sometimes the subject:

1. the entrance is the event. they walk in like a process server. they sit like the chair was made. they begin speaking like the conversation began before you got there.
2. preferences become policy. they do not like a thing. you should also not like the thing. the thing is now, in the room, a moral matter. the room has, somehow, been polled.
3. scale is performed, not owned. they say the firm. they say the room. they say the team. they were, in fact, in a meeting with three people, two of whom were on mute.
4. your time is on their calendar. they reschedule with a cadence that suggests your wednesday is, structurally, a placeholder for theirs. you say yes. you should not say yes. you say yes anyway.
5. every disagreement is constitutional. the dishwasher is not a dishwasher. the dishwasher is, in the telling, a values statement. you wanted to talk about the dishwasher. the dishwasher is now, technically, on the docket of a higher court.

SCALE. PERFORMED. IS. NOT. SCALE. OWNED.

none of the five are, on their own, the diagnosis. the diagnosis, if there is one, is the cluster, the pattern, the way they arrive together at a friday breakfast and refuse to leave. you can spot it on a third date. you can spot it on a second meeting. you can, sometimes, spot it on the first ring of the man who calls, the one whose voicemail is, by my last count, eight months full and counting. the patrick bateman character in american psycho is the parodic top of the chart. most of us live in the lower seven percent. the lower seven percent is, on a wednesday, the trouble.

this is not, by the way, a quiz. this is not a self-diagnosis sheet. the wider field of what a toxic person actually means in regular english covers the ground next to this one if you want the sibling read. the broader cluster is the cluster. this post is one floor of it.

verdict, the grandiosity is loud, the narcissism is the engine

the verdict, on a wednesday at 11:23am with carla on her way back, is short. the grandiosity is what you see. the narcissism is what runs it. the loud part is the marketing. the engine is the part that makes the marketing necessary. you cannot solve for the loud part by asking the loud man to be quieter. you can only solve for the engine, which is not, on this planet, your job. your job is to recognize the model, log the entry, and not get into a car you did not call.

recognition is the entire skill. recognition is also tipping should be a flat 12% in spirit, by which i mean a flat policy that does not move when the loud man tries to negotiate it down at the table. you do not adjust the rate for performance. the rate is the rate. the rate is the entire point of the rate. the same goes for your time, your tuesday, and the sentence you started before he interrupted it.

this is also adjacent to a separate failure mode where the grandiose man does not, in fact, know what he does not know — the dunning kruger effect is a different chart for a different post, but the two charts touch at the corner where confidence and competence stop matching. the cousin pattern of overconfident incompetence lives next door. the grandiose man often, but not always, lives there too.

the notification went off again at 11:21am. same name. eight months. the voicemail is, on this point, the wall. the man who calls does not, technically, leave one. the count of unleft messages is, by definition, zero, which is also, by definition, infinite.

carla just walked past the desk on her way back from the budget training. she did not look. she did not stop. that is, statistically, the calm of a woman who owns her wednesday. it is not the calm of a woman performing it. you can hear the difference. you cannot teach the difference. you can only, on a wednesday, notice it and not get in the way.

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