personality traits of a narcissist man explained — 1 brief investigation

personality traits in a man, sorted by how much they ruin a tuesday, is a list i have been keeping in a yellow notebook since 2019. tuesdays have not been the same since. i am still hoping tuesdays come back.

the notebook is yellow because the office supply order in 2019 came with three of them and i used the green one for grocery math and the blue one for the sentence “this is fine” written 40 times in a row. yellow got the personalities. that was not a plan. that was inventory.

it is 9:18 on a wednesday and i am writing this from the desk where i sit while other people make decisions. carla is upstairs in an annual planning meeting on the third floor. she walked past my desk on the way and did not look down, which i logged as polite, not surgical. i have, by the count i keep running, the rest of the morning. that is enough time to copy the working list into something a stranger can read without my handwriting.

1. personality traits of a narcissist man, the working list

i am not a doctor. a doctor is a man with a job and a fluorescent room. i have a yellow notebook and a desk and a kitchen at home where the personality traits of a narcissist man tend to show up first, before they get a press release. the kitchen is where the seventh microwave lives. the kitchen is where i wrote the first three items, on the back of an unopened envelope, because the unopened mail pile was right there and the pen was right there and i had a thought that did not feel safe to leave loose.

the way i think about this is closer to the broader pattern of gaslighting than to any clinic. patterns are what survive. moments are what we argue about later. the list is the patterns part. patterns of a narcissist man come back to the kitchen counter, the phone, the inbox, the apartment door, in that order, almost reliably enough to schedule.

i should say what the list is not. the list is not a diagnosis. the list is not a verdict on a specific human you live with or used to live with. the list is what someone who once dated the volvo guy writes down at 9:18am on a tuesday so the next person to ask “is this normal” has a page to look at.

2. the apartment where the draft happened over coffee

most of the items in the working list were drafted at home, on the kitchen counter, on different mornings, in coffee that had gone cold by the time the sentence was finished. the kitchen is where personality is loudest because there is no one else there to soften it. you sit, and you remember, and the coffee judges you a little bit, and the third yoga mat under the couch judges you slightly more because it has been there since 2023 and still has the price sticker on the strap.

the apartment also has the seventh microwave. the seventh microwave is relevant only because every time i look at it, i remember that i have a habit of believing my version of an event over the actual receipt of the event. the microwaves were not “unlucky.” the microwaves were “operated by someone who does not read instructions.” those are two different stories. the personality traits of a narcissist man are, in part, the habit of reaching for the first story when the second is sitting on the kitchen counter in writing.

the apartment is also where the man who calls leaves voicemails, which i do not return, which the voicemail full message has been telling me for 8 months. that is its own column in the notebook. it is not the same column.

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

tom is the closest thing i have to a control group. tom owns. i rent. tom has a wife and two kids and a volvo and a pension that he understands the way other people understand sports. tom and i have known the same people for twenty years, which means tom remembers the volvo guy from before the volvo, which means tom is the only person i can ask “did i make this up” about and trust the answer. items 1 to 4 are the ones tom corroborated when i read them out over a beer in 2022. he laughed at item 3. that was not the response i wanted but it was the response i needed.

item 1 is inflation. the personality traits of a narcissist man include a quiet, steady, almost industrial production of made-up size. the job is bigger. the salary is rounded up. the apartment “could be a duplex if the wall came down.” nothing is technically a lie. everything is technically a renovation of the truth done with a permit no one issued.

item 2 is contempt. there is always a category of person who is “not serious” and the category gets bigger every year. waiters. neighbors. the coworker who asks too many questions. eventually the category includes people he used to call friends, which is when tom usually says “and you noticed that too, right” and i say “i noticed it on a tuesday.”

item 3 is scorekeeping. every favor done is filed, with interest, in a ledger that no one else has access to and which can be invoiced at any time, retroactively, for any amount. i kept asking tom what the conversion rate was. tom said the rate is whatever the man needs the rate to be that day. that was when i wrote the word “ledger” in the notebook in capitals. it still is.

item 4 is charm on a switch. it is not that the charm is fake. the charm is real. the switch is the part that is the trait. you watch a person become two people in the time it takes a waiter to walk away from a table. tom called this “the lobby version and the elevator version.” that one made the notebook verbatim. tipping should be a flat 12%, by the way, not because of any of this, but because the switch is most visible in restaurants and i have a lot of feelings about restaurants.

4. items 5 to 8, the carla-overheard ones

items 5 to 8 i drafted at the desk, between meetings i was not invited to, with carla within earshot one floor up, which counts as supervision. carla has not seen the notebook. carla has, however, said three sentences across three different weeks that i wrote down word for word and built items 5, 6, and 7 around. item 8 i added myself in the kitchen later. credit where credit is due. and where it isn’t. that is also one of the items.

item 5 is blame migration. the fault for any specific event drifts steadily toward the person least able to argue. the waiter. the assistant. the wife. the ex with the volvo guy, eventually, even though she had nothing to do with the parking ticket from 2014. blame, in this trait, is a weather system. it goes where the wind takes it, and the wind is the man.

item 6 is memory editing. specific arguments are rewritten cleanly enough that “you said this” becomes “i never said that and i can prove it because i would never say that” within about 18 months. the proof is the absence of recording. the absence of recording is treated as evidence. this is the trait that makes the yellow notebook worth keeping. it is also the trait covered in detail in the broader gaslighting investigation if you want the long version.

item 7 is audience math. the size of the kindness is calibrated to the number of witnesses, with a coefficient. one witness, polite. five witnesses, generous. zero witnesses, the door slams a little. carla overheard a man on a phone in the elevator do all three of these in 90 seconds and i wrote it on a sticky note and put it in the notebook. the sticky note is still in the notebook. it has lost its glue but not its accuracy.

item 8 is allergy to being wrong. this is the engine. you can take any of items 1 through 7, trace it backward, and end up at item 8. the man cannot be wrong because if the man is wrong about one thing, the entire ledger from item 3 has to be re-audited, and that is more work than any human has time for in a single life. so item 8 carries the rest. item 8 is the trait under the traits.

5. closing pulpit, the personality is durable, the morning is short

the eight items have not changed in three years. that is the part that surprises me. people change. personalities, by the working evidence of the yellow notebook, do not change as much as we are told they do, especially not the items that load onto item 8. tom said this back in 2022, before i had the language for it. tom owns. tom has a pension. tom has, possibly, slightly more right to a verdict than i do. but the notebook is mine and the verdict is the same: durable.

this is also why the personality traits of a narcissist man are a useful list to keep before you need a list. you do not assemble a fire extinguisher during the fire. you put it on the wall when nothing is burning, and then on the day, you reach for it, and it is exactly where you left it, with a label, in english, near the door. the yellow notebook is a fire extinguisher with worse handwriting.

this kind of working list has a sibling in another investigation about being the kind of idiot who keeps a yellow notebook in the first place — the idiot in question being me, sitting at a desk a wednesday, copying notebook into post while the third floor decides what the third floor decides.

if you want a slightly different angle on the same patterns, an old episode of brothers writing each other letters during a war does more work on contempt and scorekeeping in a single hour than this notebook will do in a year. i am not the first person to keep a list. i am just the only person keeping this one.

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