narcissistic red flag — 1 investigation

a single red flag, by itself, is something you can talk yourself out of, and i did, for about a year. one flag is a quirk. two flags is a coincidence. three flags is a parade and i was the marching band.

i’m typing this from the desk, monday, 11:23am, with the supermarket receipt from last night still wedged under the keyboard like a bookmark to a chapter i did not want to reread. carla is on the third floor at a vendor walkthrough that started without her and will end without me. that gives me, generously, about forty minutes before someone notices the chair is occupied by a man writing instead of a man working.

narcissistic red flag, the disclaimer about the singular

let me say this and you can underline it with whatever you have on you. the phrase narcissistic red flag is singular for marketing reasons. nobody clicks on the plural. the plural is honest and the plural does not perform. one flag sells a paragraph. five flags sell a memoir nobody finishes.

i was, in my own running notes, a person who saw one flag and made it a hobby to explain it. the explanation was always generous. the explanation was always wrong. i’m not bitter about this. bitter is a flavor i ran out of around month nine. the etymology people, by which i mean the etymonline page on the word flag, will tell you the word started as a piece of cloth that hangs limp until something moves it. i find that emotionally accurate. not catching a flag is, technically, a moron move; i wrote about being a moron from the inside, which covers that side of the same coin.

one signal you can rationalize. two signals you can call coincidence. by the third you are, technically, doing field research on yourself. read the broader gaslighting investigation if you want the long version of why a single behavior, repeated softly, can rewrite a year of your memory without your written consent.

the supermarket where this draft was, in part, prepared

last night i was in the supermarket. i was buying cold pizza ingredients, which is to say, cold pizza, because cold pizza is breakfast and hot pizza is dinner and any objection to that ordering is a different problem. i was in the freezer aisle and a man two carts away was on speaker, and his voice did the thing.

the thing is hard to describe in a way that holds up in court. it’s a voice that explains your day back to you with small edits. you said one thing, the voice repeats it as a slightly different thing, and now there is a draft and an edited version and the edited version is the one that survives. i was not even on the call. i was buying frozen dough. i still felt edited.

i put the dough in the cart. i looked at the dough. the dough looked back, which is something dough does not do, but the supermarket lighting at 8:14pm on a thursday convinces you of things that, in daylight, you would explain as stress.

carla walked past with a flag-shaped opinion, allegedly

this morning carla walked past my desk with a coffee that she did not offer to share, which is fine, i am not owed coffee, i am owed approximately nothing, and she said, without breaking stride, “you’re writing about him again.” she did not say his name. there was no him to name. the him is structural. the him is whatever the post needs to push against.

carla has, over the eighteen months of sitting near me, developed a sixth sense for when the draft is autobiographical and when it is research. today’s draft is, technically, both. she did not slow down. i did not look up. we have a system. the system is that she walks and i pretend to type and we both know what’s happening and neither of us says it out loud, which is, ironically, the healthiest version of communication i currently maintain.

i ran the supermarket call past chatgpt in a private window because i wanted a second opinion that did not come with a face. i typed the man’s three sentences. i asked, “is this anything.” the screen said, in essence, that it was something, but that one exchange does not a diagnosis make, which is the most polite thing a screen has ever said to me. the screen does not know the previous nine exchanges. the screen does not know the year. the screen, like me a year ago, is being generous with insufficient data.

flags 1 to 5, the chatgpt-flagged ones

here is the short list i could not get the screen to deny, even on the second prompt. five behaviors. each one, alone, defensible. all five, together, a problem you eventually have to name out loud while standing in a freezer aisle holding dough.

1. the rewrite. a thing happened. the next day, the thing happened slightly differently in the retelling. by the third retelling, you were the one who did it.
2. the silence. not the comfortable kind. the punitive kind. the kind that lasts long enough that you start cataloguing things you might apologize for, in alphabetical order, just in case.
3. the love-bomb. the apology that arrives too big. flowers for a small thing. a speech for a misunderstanding. the volume is the message and the volume says you owe them now.
4. the audience. the kind tone in front of friends, the cold tone alone, and a separate version of you that exists for each room. you start performing your own life from the cheap seats.
5. the small lie. not the dramatic lie. the small lie about the time, the receipt, the third yoga mat that, according to one of you, was definitely thrown out, and according to the other one of you, is still under the couch since 2023, possibly evolving.

that last one is mine. the third yoga mat is real and it is mine and i did not invent it for this post. it is, however, a useful prop. if a partner insists it never existed, that is a flag. if they insist it does not currently exist while you are looking at it, that is the parade.

productivity bro online posted, this week, a thread that called all five of these “growth opportunities.” productivity bro can speak for productivity bro. the thread had 4.2k likes. the thread is, in itself, a flag of a different kind, the kind where someone monetizes recognizing patterns in other people while not recognizing any in themselves. i read the thread. i screenshotted it. i did not engage. engagement is what the thread was hunting.

verdict, the flag is red, the eyes are tired

here’s where the post leaves the page and lands in the cart. one narcissistic red flag, on its own, is a quirk and you can defend it. you should not have to. defense is exhausting and exhaustion is, eventually, the diagnosis. you do not need a manual to tell you something is wrong, although the long-form of any cable drama from the early 2000s will tell you the same thing in seven seasons of subtext.

the seventh microwave is on its way thursday. unrelated, but worth noting, because the only thing on this desk older than my pattern recognition is my appliance count. carla is back from three at noon. i have, by the kitchen clock and not by any other clock, eighteen minutes left to type and four to look productive.

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