narcissist red flags — 1 thorough investigation

red flags is a metaphor that has been done to death and so i will use it anyway because i am not above a tired metaphor when it works. it works here. there were red flags. i was, it turns out, partially color blind.

i am writing this from the desk. it is tuesday at 2:14pm and carla is upstairs in a training session about a tool none of us will use after the renewal review. i have, i am told, the rest of the morning before anyone notices i am not in a room pretending to nod.

the doctor’s office did this to me, partly. i went in for a physical and left with a bill, a referral i will not chase, and the calm, sourceless certainty that the man across the desk had been bored by my answers. you do not pay for that. you pay around it.

narcissist red flags, the working set (~260)

the list is shorter than the discourse around it. the discourse is a small industry; the list fits on a receipt. five flags, maybe six on a generous day, and the rest is ornamentation that the wellness internet sells back to you. i made a chart on the back of an envelope last night. the envelope was from the gaslighting end of the unopened mail pile, which felt thematically correct.

flag one: the rewrite. you say the thing happened on a wednesday and they say no, it was thursday, and also you misremember what was said, and also you misremember how you felt about it. flag two: the audience. there is always one. even when the room is two people, one of them is performing and one of them is the audience, and you are the audience in your own life. flag three: the verdict before the conversation.

flag four is charm calibrated to the watcher. flag five is the small absences when no one is watching, the slack you pay for. and there is the soft sixth, which is the sense that you are always slightly in debt to them for something you cannot itemize. that is the one you spot last because you have already paid it twice.

i ran the working set against the recent past. it scored embarrassingly. the chart, in the end, was just five tally marks and a stain from the kettle.

the desk where the subscription audit ran in parallel (~260)

i was supposed to be doing a subscription audit. i had opened the bank app. this was a spiritual event and i had earned a snack for it. the audit had three columns: the ones i use, the ones i forgot, the ones that are basically rent for an app that watches me sleep.

i did the math. i know how to do the math. i did the math the way i do all math, which is by adding the small numbers, getting tired, and rounding the rest into “fine.” the audit became, somewhere around the second cancellation page, a different audit entirely. i started crossing off subscriptions and started writing the names of small behaviors instead. you can do the same exercise with people. it is cheaper and it stings the same.

the page where you cancel is always three clicks deep and asks you a question on the way out, and the question is designed to make you feel small for leaving. that is also a flag, when a person does it. the are-you-sure with a wounded face. the discount that arrives only at the door. the reminder that nobody will love you the way they did. these are streaming-service tactics. i understand why they work. i understand that they should not.

the chatgpt summary, briefly, before i ignored it

i opened chatgpt because the audit was depressing and i wanted a second opinion that would not bill me. i typed the focus phrase, narcissist red flags, into the box and waited the polite second it pretends to think. it gave me a list. the list was fine. the list was the list a list would write if a list had nothing to lose.

productivity bro, who lives online and never in any room, would have screenshotted this and posted it as a thread with numbered emojis i refuse to render. he would call it a framework. he would put a small house icon at the top because productivity bro thinks every framework is also a small house. i closed the tab. then i reopened it. then i closed it again, which is the only honest workflow i have ever had.

the chatgpt summary said roughly what the working set says, which is what every list of this kind says, which is that you already knew. you do not need a model to confirm the obvious. you need a quiet room and a willingness to not flinch. the room is the desk. the willingness is whatever the kettle is doing.

i did not save the conversation. i never save them. they accumulate like the unopened mail pile, but with worse handwriting.

flags 1 to 5, the doctors-office-grade ones (~260)

i call them doctors-office-grade because they are the ones that, if you described them to a doctor in a calm voice, the doctor would write something on a pad and not look up. that is the bar. you do not need a label; you need the pad.

1. the historian. they rewrite the recent past in real time, with confidence and a soft voice, and you find yourself agreeing because their tone is so steady. the tone is the trick. it is also why a good liar can make a tuesday into a friday and you will not catch the lie until you check your own calendar in the bathroom and feel briefly insane. lying with a calm voice is a craft. they have practiced. the liar with the steady voice is the most expensive person in the room.

2. the audience. the room is always a room with a stage in it. you can hear the small adjustments to posture when a third person enters. the laugh becomes louder by exactly a quarter step.

3. the verdict before the conversation. you arrive at the kitchen with a sentence and they arrive with the ruling. the conversation, if it happens at all, is a formality that follows the verdict. this is also how i feel about court shows on tv, like the one judith sheindlin used to run, which i looked up at judge judy on imdb the way a man looks up his own birthday for a form. the format works because the verdict is the engine. that is good television. it is bad romance.

4. charm by audience size. stranger in a hallway: bright. you in the kitchen: dim. 5. the small absences. calls not returned, the slack at the soft edges, the ten-minute lateness that adds up to a year.

verdict, the flags are red, the colors are correct (~240)

i will admit that mondays are objectively the day i notice the flags most clearly, because monday is a diagnostic day, and tuesday is a coping day, and the rest of the week is a soft blur of agreeing with people in elevators. that is a hot take and i stand by it.

the seventh microwave hummed through this paragraph, which is unrelated and also somehow not. the unopened mail pile is mostly red envelopes again, which is the universe being on the nose. the audit is unfinished. the pad in the doctor’s office, in my head, has a small dot on it where he put his pen and forgot.

the verdict, in the small voice i save for the desk: there were five flags and i counted four and rounded down. that is the whole investigation. the chart is on the envelope. the envelope is in the pile. the pile is on the desk. the desk is where i write from. carla is still upstairs.

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