signs of a toxic person — 1 investigation

signs, like the literal metal kind on a highway, is what i wish the universe had bothered to install earlier in certain situations of mine. the universe does not, however, install signs for you. the universe sends one bad date in 2019 and lets you draw your own at home.

i am writing this from my desk on a thursday morning, 8:14pm, while carla sits two floors above me in some annual planning meeting that the calendar described, accurately, as “alignment.” i have approximately 51 minutes before the spreadsheet i am supposed to be looking at becomes the spreadsheet someone asks about. that is a generous window for a working list i have been keeping, half-formally, since i was a younger and worse-organized version of myself.

the working list is short, which is the only kind of list that survives a second draft.

the working theory, before the list, is that gaslighting is just one of these signs in formal dress. the rest are the same instinct wearing weekend clothes. you don’t need a clinical name for any of it. you need a list short enough to hold in your head while the phone is ringing and you are deciding, again, not to answer.

the phone, at the time of writing, has been ringing on and off for eleven days. it is not a friend. it is not maggie, who runs a small business now and has employees with payroll and would text instead. it is the man who calls, whose number i recognize the way one recognizes weather. i let it go to voicemail at the ATM on a monday and i have been letting it go since.

1. signs of a toxic person, the working list (eight items)

the working list of signs of a toxic person, refined this morning between 9:18 and 9:46, runs to eight. it used to be twelve. four were absorbed into other items because honest categories shrink. the remaining eight are the ones i could not collapse without losing the texture of the thing.

i wrote them on the back of an envelope from the bank app i don’t open, which is a piece of paper that the bank insisted on sending me about the bank app i had specifically downloaded so that no paper would arrive. the envelope is, in this sense, a sign of something else, but it makes a fine surface for a list.

the eight, briefly: the score-keeper, the weather-person, the auditor, the vanisher, the favor-collector, the pity-merchant, the audience, the historian. i will get to each of them. for now, the only thing worth saying is that none of them are dramatic. drama would be easy to spot. these are the room-temperature versions, which is why a person can keep one for years without naming it.

2. the kitchen where the draft started, and the phone that did not stop

the draft started in the kitchen at 6:42 last night, on a chair that is, eventually, a bar stool. the kitchen is the room of the apartment where things get made and unmade. the microwave on the counter is the seventh microwave i have killed; its digital clock runs eight minutes fast and i have left it that way as a small private penalty.

the phone, on the counter beside the kettle, vibrated three times during dinner. the dinner was a piece of toast. the three vibrations were, in order: an unknown number, the same unknown number, and a notification that my screen time was up two percent over last week. the notification, in this small drama, was the only honest party.

i mention the phone because the phone is where most of these signs of a toxic person now live. the phone has replaced the front porch and the dinner table and the long walk. signs that used to take a year to recognize now take a thursday. that is technically progress, although it does not feel like it from the chair.

the kettle, by the way, is the kindest object in the kitchen. it requires nothing of me except water, which the apartment provides free, and a button, which i can manage on most days. there is no version of the kettle that asks me how i’m doing while waiting for the answer that fits the version of me it has decided to be friends with.

3. items 1 to 4 — the dodged-call ones

items one through four are the signs i recognized, slowly and badly, by way of a phone i was not picking up. each one is, in its way, a reason the phone was on the counter and not in my hand.

sign one — the score-keeper. they keep a running tally of who texted last and they will, given a third drink, recite it. the score is never to your favor. the score is the relationship. you exist in their head as a row in a spreadsheet they did not show you and which is graded on a curve set by their mood.

sign two — the weather-person. they are warm in march and cold in november and there is no reason for the change other than a season they refuse to name. you adjust your jacket. you keep adjusting. you start dressing for two weathers and arriving at neither.

sign three — the auditor. they will, without warning, audit your life out loud at a dinner you paid for. your job, your apartment, your hot takes, the unopened mail pile they spotted on the counter behind you. they leave with the sense that they helped. they did not. you sit in the kitchen afterwards and reorganize the pile, which moves the pile but does not reduce it.

sign four — the vanisher. they only appear when you are thriving and disappear the second you are not. they do not mean to. they have been trained, by an algorithm or a parent, to attend only to peaks. valleys make them nervous. the valley is where most of life is lived, including this thursday.

the dodged calls, on this telling, are not failures. they are the appropriate response to a working list i had not yet written down. the man who calls keeps calling because he does not know about the list. once i write the list, in some sense, i am answering him.

4. items 5 to 8 — the maggie-counter-example ones

items five through eight are the signs i recognized, more slowly and even worse, by way of a person who did not exhibit any of them. that person is maggie, who i have known since approximately three coffees in 2019, and who, by all available evidence, does not score-keep, weather-shift, audit, or vanish. she runs a small business now. she has employees with payroll. she texts when the topic is the topic and does not text when it isn’t, which is the rarest thing a person can do.

i mention maggie not as a reverse-sign — there is no formal counter-list — but as the calibration object. she is how i know the eight signs are real. the eight signs are the absence of whatever maggie is doing. an idiot abroad the show has a similar function for travel, in that karl pilkington is not enjoying any of it and his honesty becomes the only stable measurement in the frame. maggie is my karl. i hold this comparison loosely.

sign five — the favor-collector. every interaction is a deposit they will withdraw later, with interest, in a context you did not sign up for. one of them once asked me to drive a car across two states. the car had no plates. maggie has never asked me for anything that wasn’t already on the table.

sign six — the pity-merchant. they sell pity at scale and expect gratitude in cash. the pity is real. the gratitude is the price. you pay it for years and only notice the receipt when the universe declines, briefly, to issue another.

sign seven — the audience. they do not converse. they wait for you to finish. when you finish, they begin a separate, parallel monologue that uses your last three words as a launch ramp. this is technically a conversation in the way that watching two televisions at once is technically a movie.

sign eight — the historian. they keep a folder of old grievances and consult it during new ones. nothing is over. everything is in the investigation. i submit, with the appropriate humility, that cars should have one cupholder. six is greed. a person who keeps six cupholders for grievances is a person whose car you should not get in.

SIGNS. ARE OBSERVABLE. NAMES. ARE OPTIONAL.

5. closing pulpit — the signs are abundant, the toxic person is local

the closing observation, after fifty-one minutes of work and one envelope from a bank i avoid via an app i don’t open, is that the signs of a toxic person are not rare. they are abundant. you live among them. some of them live with you, in the sense that some of the items on the working list, on a bad week, also describe me.

i am, on certain mornings, an auditor. i am, on certain evenings, a historian. i can be a vanisher when a friend is having the kind of week i do not know how to attend. the working list is also a mirror, which is the small honest thing i have been avoiding by reading the list out loud only when nobody is in the room.

the eight items are not a final document. they will shrink again, probably to six, by the end of the next annual planning meeting. the goal is not a clean list. the goal is a list short enough to remember while standing at the ATM with a phone vibrating in the other pocket. eight is the upper limit. six is the working number. one is the version of the list a person can act on, and that version reads: the call you have been dodging for eleven days is not, on examination, a call you owe.

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