malignant narcissist characteristics — 1 fairly sure investigation

malignant characteristics, said in a flat voice, sounds like the side of a pesticide can. that is, in fact, what i am about to argue: that the warning labels on the can and the warnings my body sends about certain people are written in nearly the same font.

i am writing this from my desk on a wednesday at 10:14am. carla is on the third floor doing a budget training that will, she warned me, eat the rest of her morning. i have, give or take, an hour and the soft hum of my own monitor for company. that is the deal here. that is always the deal here.

this is a companion piece to the traits post i wrote yesterday on a similar topic, the difference being that traits are the inside of a person and characteristics are the outside, and i am, for reasons that will become clear, more comfortable today on the outside. it is less work. it is less feeling. it is more like watching a documentary about an animal you would not pet.

before i go any further, i should say what kind of investigation this is and is not. i am not a clinician. i am not a researcher. i looked it up. that is the extent of my credentials. but i did live with one of these, briefly, in a small apartment, and i can tell you that the apartment got smaller every week, and at some point i could not tell whether the apartment was shrinking or i was. for a fuller frame, i pointed people earlier this week to my pillar on the form of doubt this whole cluster orbits around, which lives at the top of the cluster and explains why the smaller-apartment feeling is not a metaphor invented by me.

1. malignant narcissist characteristics, the working list

here is what i mean by characteristics. traits are private weather. characteristics are public clothes. characteristics are what a neighbor would notice over a year. characteristics are what shows up in the photos. characteristics are the things you can write down on a napkin at the corner without any whisper-of-clinic in your voice.

i am going to give you eight. eight is the number that fit on the napkin, which is, by my own ridiculous standards, the science of this house. four of them i learned from the_ex, in the sense that i lived through them and still cannot un-see them. four of them dave corroborated over the phone last night, in the sense that he listened, did not laugh once, and then said “yeah, that sounds about right” in his insurance voice.

the eight characteristics, as a flat list, before the apartment closes in:

1. contempt that leaks through small kindnesses
2. charm that is rationed, not given
3. real-time edits of yesterday’s facts
4. a flat space where guilt should be
5. the long memory of perceived slights
6. the short memory of own promises
7. the audience switch, mid-sentence, mid-room
8. the missing apology that never arrives, even after

i remind you that i am not a doctor. i am a man with an apartment and a phone and a friend named dave, which is, depending on your tolerance for amateurs, either the worst or the best possible setup for this.

2. the apartment where dave called mid-draft

i started this post yesterday after work and got, depending on how you count, three sentences in before the phone did its thing. the phone always does its thing. the second ring, before i have even said hello, dave asks the question.

dave then sat with me for forty minutes, which is, in dave-time, a year. he was eating something crunchy. he was, i could hear, in his car. dave is always in his car. dave’s car is dave’s office, and his office is, somehow, also a place where lunch happens. i envy this only on certain afternoons.

the apartment, while we talked, did the apartment thing. the seventh microwave, brand new, hummed to itself in a way that suggested it had not yet decided whether to like me. the third yoga mat, in the closet, did its silent rolled-up judgement. the apartment has a way of listening to phone calls. i am aware of how that sounds.

i mention all of this because the place where you write about a thing changes the thing. if i wrote this from a corner cafe, with espresso machines screaming, the characteristics would feel smaller, more abstract, more like a podcast topic. back at home, where the actual data was generated, they feel like furniture you tripped over recently. and that is the only authority i can claim. the tripping.

3. items 1 to 4, the ex-corroborated ones

item one. contempt that leaks through small kindnesses. the gift comes with a comment. the comment is small. the comment is “interesting choice”, said about your shoes. the comment is “i thought you’d want the bigger one”, said about a slice of cake. the comment, the first thirty times, is a comment. by the fortieth time it is a posture. you cannot point to any single comment as cruel. you can point to the weather pattern. that is the characteristic. weather, not events.

item two. charm that is rationed, not given. there is, in this kind of person, a real charm. it works on waiters. it works on parents-of-other-people. it works at parties. it does not work, after a while, at home. you watch them put the charm on like a coat at the door, and take it off in the elevator on the way back up. for a long time you assume this is what everyone does. then you meet a normal person and you realize, no, normal people are the same height in both rooms.

item three. real-time edits of yesterday’s facts. this is the thing i wrote about in the definition piece a few weeks back, where the dictionary feels too clean for what the experience is. you say “you said tuesday”. they say “i never said tuesday, i said the week of wednesday, you do this every time”. you are now arguing about whether you do this every time, which is, conveniently, not about tuesday. the characteristic is the speed. it happens before you have set down the cup.

item four. a flat space where guilt should be. this is the one i still cannot quite describe. ordinary people, when they hurt you, have a face that does a small wince. the wince is involuntary. the wince is the guilt clearing its throat. with this kind of person, the wince is missing. the face stays at the same brightness. you keep looking for the wince. you keep mistaking the absence of it for calm. it is not calm. it is real estate where guilt did not move in.

the_ex, who i will not describe further than i need to, currently lives with a man who drives a volvo. the volvo is not the point. the volvo is, however, the object i can put in this paragraph instead of any further description. that is the deal i have with myself. less detail. more volvo.

4. items 5 to 8, the dave-corroborated ones

item five. the long memory of perceived slights. they remember a thing you said in 2019. you do not remember 2019. you remember thursday. they have a filing cabinet for grievances and a recycling bin for compliments, and the cabinet has a label-maker, and the labels are in alphabetical order. dave, who works in insurance, says the people who remember the most are usually the ones who pay the least, and i have decided that this is wisdom, even if dave only meant claims.

item six. the short memory of own promises. the inverse of item five. they will say “i never agreed to that” about a thing that was, on a thursday, a whole conversation. you may have a text. the text will be reinterpreted. the text “yes” will, somehow, mean “yes, in principle, but not in this specific situation, and you should have known”. the man who calls about old debts has, i swear, the same script. that is not a coincidence. that is a characteristic, traveling.

item seven. the audience switch, mid-sentence, mid-room. a third person walks in. the tone changes. the same sentence finishes in a different voice. you were being criticized; now you are being lightly teased; now the third person is laughing; now you are the one who cannot take a joke. this is, mechanically, the part that breaks normal people. it is the most legible characteristic. it is the easiest one to film, if you ever get the chance, which you should not, because you should not be filming people in your own apartment, even if. even if.

item eight. the missing apology that never arrives, even after. after the fight. after the cooling. after the long walk. after the conversation with the friend. after the small gesture of returning. the apology, the actual apology, never arrives. what arrives instead is a meal cooked, a joke remembered, a hand on the shoulder, a question about your day. you take the meal. the meal is not the apology. you know this. you eat it anyway. that is the mechanism that keeps the whole thing running, and it is the reason i am writing this post from a desk that is mine and an apartment that has only my things in it. the characteristic is the absence. you cannot photograph absence. you can, however, write it down, on a wednesday, while a budget training happens upstairs.

dave, on the call, said one of these out loud, which is rare, because dave does not usually do feelings without some whiplash of comic relief afterwards (the movie, not the metaphor — see the drumming-in-blood film if you want the closest cinematic shorthand for what item one feels like over a year). he said: “the missing apology one is the worst.” he said it without the crunching food. that, in dave-units, is concession.

5. closing pulpit, the characteristics are heavy and the apartment is small

the apartment, by the time i was finished talking to dave last night, was its actual size again. this happens. the characteristics i described above have a way of inflating the rooms when you think about them and deflating the rooms when you say them out loud. i recommend saying them out loud. preferably to a dave. preferably with crunching food in the background, so that the gravity of the topic does not, by accident, become the topic.

also relevant, briefly, because i am the judge of what is relevant in my own post: every meeting could be a 3-line email. i thought this earlier today watching carla pack up her notebook. i think this every wednesday. it has nothing to do with malignant characteristics, except in the way that the same energy required to keep an unnecessary meeting alive is the energy required to keep a difficult person comfortable in a small apartment. that is, i admit, a stretch. it is also, in my reckoning, true.

if any of these eight match your weather, that is information. it is not advice. i am not the man for advice. i am the man for the napkin and the phone call and the apartment and the friend who picks up on the second ring. that is the budget i work with. dave will probably read this and tell me i should have left out item four. i will probably leave it in.

and if you want to see what this looks like dramatized, there is the patrick-bateman cinema of an investment-banker thriller from 2000, which is so loud and so obvious it actually makes the eight characteristics i listed look small. that, by the way, is the trick. the loud version trains us to miss the quiet version. the quiet version is the one that lives in apartments.

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