staying away from toxic people — 1 investigation

staying away, as a verb phrase, implies you knew where they were in the first place. i did not always know where they were. that was, in retrospect, by design. i am about to argue the design is the trait.

the time on the corner of the screen reads 2:47pm, a wednesday, and carla has gone upstairs for an all-hands on the third floor that will eat ninety minutes of her morning and roughly forty-five of mine. i have the desk to myself, the rest of this hour, and a topic i did not plan to write about until a man in a fleece vest cut the line at the atm and asked me, with full eye contact, if the machine was working.

i told him yes. i lied. it was not working. i had already tried. i wanted him to find that out himself, in the way he had decided to find out everything, which is by other people. that, friend, is staying away from toxic people. that is the whole technique. you let the machine teach them.

this post is part of a longer investigation into gaslighting and the people who do it on purpose, which is the pillar of the cluster, and which i recommend if you are arriving here from a search bar and a bad week. this one, the one you are reading, is the verb. the practice. the daily.

staying away from toxic people, the working set

i want to be honest about something before i list anything. i am not the man who has solved this. i am the man who has narrowed it to a list of things that mostly work, on most days, when i remember to do them, which is, by my own count, less than half the time. the other half i answer the phone and regret it for forty minutes.

so. the working set. five things i actually do. five things that, taken together, comprise the practice of staying away from toxic people without having to put it on a calendar or rehearse it in front of a mirror.

one. do not answer first. let the second ring be the first ring. let the third ring be the second. there is a category of person who reads “answered on first ring” as “available” and “available” as “owes me a follow-up”. remove the data. remove the rung.

two. do not explain twice. the first explanation is generosity. the second explanation is admission. i learned this from watching the wrong people get me to repeat myself until i contradicted myself, which they then read back to me as proof of something. one explanation, declined politely, is plenty. that’s a closed loop.

three. do not be reachable on their schedule. i muted a group chat in march and have not opened it since. the world did not end. nobody died. nobody, importantly, called me to say “you missed something”. whatever the something was, it filed itself under “not for me” and i kept the morning.

four. do not stand near them at an atm. i mean this literally and i mean it as a metaphor. the literal version is the man in the fleece. the metaphor version is any place where they get to corner you with a small request that is actually a large one. cafeterias. elevators. the printer. these are their courts. you do not walk into the court.

five. do not narrate the staying. this is the one i fail at most. the urge to explain to a friend that you are not talking to so-and-so anymore is, itself, a way of not staying away. you are still in the room with them, just describing the room out loud. shut up. close the investigation. open another one.

the atm where this draft started, ironically

the atm is a block from the office. i had walked over to deposit a check, which is a sentence i am aware sounds like 1997, but the check exists, and the bank app, which i am also not opening this week, requires a mobile deposit i do not feel like mobiling. so i went in person. so did the man in the fleece.

he asked me three things in the order he asked them. one, is the machine working. two, do i know if the inside of the bank is open. three, would i be willing to go in and ask. the third one is the one that gave him away. that is the move. the move is to find someone who has not yet learned to say no to small free errands and convert them, on the spot, into your assistant. this is the toxic person at the atm. they are not yelling. they are not insulting anyone. they are simply outsourcing their friday morning to a stranger and assuming the stranger will say yes because the stranger looks like a person who says yes.

i said no. i said it the way i have been practicing, which is to say without an excuse attached. “no” with no comma after it. just the word. then nothing. then waiting. the man in the fleece blinked twice, said “wow”, and left. the wow is the tell. the wow means he runs that play often enough to expect a yes. one in twenty people says no. i was, today, the one.

i thought about the man in the fleece for the rest of the walk back to the office. i thought about him, also, while logging into the desk and opening this file. i thought about him, mostly, while remembering the ex with the volvo guy, who used to do the same play with movers, with parking, with the lady at the post office, with everyone — and how it took me four years to notice that i had become the lady at the post office, full time, salaried, no benefits.

tom does this with calendar discipline, i do it with phone neglect

tom and i agree on the goal. we disagree, as we usually do, on the method. tom has a system. tom has, in fact, several systems. tom’s system for staying away from toxic people involves a calendar with color codes, a “do not disturb” schedule that mirrors his work hours plus a buffer, and a wife who screens his phone when his name comes up on a number he does not recognize. tom owns a house in a suburb with a cul-de-sac. tom’s system is the system of a man who owns a cul-de-sac.

i rent. i have a phone. the phone has a battery that is, currently, at 23%, and a voicemail that, i am told, has been full for eight months. that is my system. tom does this with calendar discipline. i do it with phone neglect. we are both, by our own accounts, succeeding.

tom called me once, mid-march, to ask why i had not returned a text. i told him the text was, technically, in the same bucket as the voicemail, which is to say a bucket i no longer carry around. he said this was unsustainable. i said the unsustainable thing has been sustained, by me, for two years. he said he worried about me. i said he should not. i said it like i meant it, because i did. then i hung up, because tom calls from a number my phone has decided to silence, which is a kindness i did not engineer but accept gratefully.

the truth is tom is right and i am right and we are both, in our different ways, doing the same thing. we are reducing surface area. tom is doing it with architecture. i am doing it with entropy. (this is the third yoga mat under my couch, i am aware of how that sounds, the comparison still holds.)

the man who calls — and he calls, plural, weekly, from a number i could probably identify if i wanted to identify it, which i do not — has not gotten through in fourteen months. that is also a system. it is just a system that runs without me.

tactics 1 to 5, the wall-of-insults ones

i keep, on a private page nobody else has the link to, a wall of insults. these are things specific people have said to me over the years that i copied down at the time, partly to remember, partly to disprove later, partly because writing a thing down is a kind of staying away from it — you put it on the wall, the wall holds it, you go home. the wall is digital. the wall does not require a frame. the wall, importantly, does not respond.

i pulled it up this morning. there are, by a quick scroll, forty-one entries. the oldest is from 2018. the newest is from february. the average sentiment is, let’s call it, “you would understand if you were smarter,” which is a sentence that, in retrospect, every toxic person i have known has said to me at least once, in different vests.

here are five tactics i have stolen from the wall of insults, in the spirit of using them against the people who provided them. consider this an attribution-free citation.

tactic one. the toilet paper roll goes UNDER. over is for monsters. i mention this because it is, technically, one of my recurring positions, but i bring it up here because the kind of person who fights me on this in 2026 is the same kind of person you should be staying away from. the over-roll people have a personality. it is not a good one.

tactic two. when the toxic person asks “did you mean to” — about anything, about the email, about the silence, about the choice of restaurant — the answer is yes. not “i didn’t mean to”. not “i hadn’t thought about it”. yes. yes, i meant to. they are scanning for the soft spot. give them the wall.

tactic three. say “huh” instead of agreeing. “huh” is the most useful syllable in the english language for these situations. it sounds like agreement. it commits to nothing. you can “huh” a man for forty minutes and walk away from the table owing him exactly zero new opinions. the man in the fleece would have eaten three of these.

tactic four. ask chatgpt for a second opinion before you reply to anything. i am not endorsing the second opinion. i am endorsing the pause. the pause is the thing. by the time chatgpt has produced a polite, generic, mildly incorrect answer, you have remembered why you were not going to reply in the first place. close the tab. close the chat. eat lunch.

tactic five. cultivate a movie habit. specifically: watch the talented mr. ripley once a year, and watch gone girl once every two. not for the plots. for the faces. there is a face that toxic people make, in real life, that those two films catalog with frightening accuracy. once you have seen the face on a screen, you start to see it across a desk. the wall of insults has, in my reckoning, been more than half-built by people whose faces, in retrospect, were doing the ripley thing the whole time.

verdict, the staying away is mostly waiting

so. five tactics, one wall, one atm, one fleece, one tom, one cul-de-sac i do not own, one phone at 23%, one voicemail full for eight months, one ex with a volvo guy who is, as far as i can tell, still doing the same thing to someone else, who is not me, which is the whole point.

the staying away from toxic people, when you actually do it for a calendar year, is mostly waiting. waiting for the call you do not return. waiting for the text you do not answer. waiting for the meeting you do not attend. waiting for the man at the atm to give up and go ask the next person. eventually he does. eventually they all do. the waiting is the work.

if you came here for a five-step program with worksheets, i have failed you, and i am sorry, sort of. if you came here because you are tired and want to know that someone else also finds the not-answering exhausting and worth it, hello. it is. it is also, somewhere on the other side of about month six, the lightest a morning at the desk has ever felt. the unopened mail pile and i have come to an understanding. the voicemail and i are at peace. the man in the fleece, who i will probably see again on monday, can keep blinking.

if you want the longer version of why this even works on people who think rules do not apply to them, i wrote up a separate piece on how to look genuinely dumb on purpose around the wrong people — the dumb act, deployed correctly at an atm or a wine night or a printer, is its own kind of moat. it is not the same as staying away. it is what you do when staying away is, for forty seconds, not an option.

↑