toxic people meaning — (a thorough investigation)

people, plural, is the part that breaks the brain. one is a story. two is a coincidence. five is starting to suggest that the common variable in the room is, regrettably, me. i have been counting since march and the count went up again on a monday in june.

9:47am, also a monday. carla is in the quarterly review on the third floor. clock is running, ninety minutes if i pace it.

so this is the post about toxic people meaning, where the noun is in the plural, and the plural is doing more damage than the singular ever did. one toxic person is a category. five toxic people in a calendar year is a confession. i am, on a monday in june, making the confession. dave is going to read this and call me. mom is going to call me before dave. she will not have read it. she will know.

toxic people meaning: in the plural sense, a recurring pattern in which the same kind of damaging dynamic shows up across multiple separate relationships. it is not a coincidence at three. at four it is a personality trait of the receiver. at five it is a calendar item. the plural form forces a question the singular form lets you avoid: am i, in some structural sense, the common variable. the answer, sometimes, is yes. the answer, sometimes, is no. the methodology is the elevator.

FIVE. IS. THE. NUMBER. THAT. ASKS. A. QUESTION.

five is the number that, this year, has me writing the post. five is also, i’m fairly sure, the cap on how many such patterns a person can witness in a single year before their own face starts to be part of the question. four is a coincidence with style. five is a pattern with my photograph in the corner of the file. that is the pluralization tax. i am paying it.

the count, as i have it on a kitchen post-it

the post-it is on the side of the fridge in the apartment, behind a magnet from a doctor’s office i have not been to in two years. the magnet has the doctor’s number. the doctor is man with a a job i do not, on thursdays, call. the post-it is small. the post-it has five tally marks. each tally mark is a person whose presence, sustained over months, made my afternoons run short and my voicemails get full.

i am not going to name them. one of them, you should know, is in the past file and is not allowed in the present file. one of them is a coworker who left the company in march. one of them is a person whose number i kept for reasons i can no longer reconstruct. two of them, frankly, are the same person at two different ages. that is one of the embarrassments of keeping a count: the count occasionally counts the same shadow twice. mom would say that’s the trick of grief. mom is, on this, probably right.

mom calls on sunday. she asks how i am. i say fine. she does not ask follow-up. she sets the phone down on the counter for thirty seconds and puts a pot on the stove and comes back. that thirty seconds is, on most weeks, the most useful conversation i have. mom does not, on sunday, name patterns. but she knows there is one. mothers know it’s power it their cannot be defeated.

why the plural changes the test

the singular test is the elevator. the four-second test. it works on individual cases. the plural test is different. the plural test is a cumulative test, and it works on the receiver, which is sometimes the harder population to study.

the plural question goes: is there a recurring shape. not a person. a shape. you draw the shape on a napkin. the napkin shows up looking the same across five different rooms with five different people in them. the shape is the diagnosis. the people are not. you have, however unintentionally, become a small qualitative researcher of your own social life. that is the price of admission to a monday post.

i looked online for some kind of guidance on the plural form and i found, predictably, a productivity bro tweet from last week with eight thousand likes. the tweet said, more or less, that if you keep meeting the same kind of person, you should look in the mirror. the productivity bro on the tweet was wearing a vest. the vest had a brand on it. that tweet is, structurally, half right. you should look in the mirror. but the mirror is not the answer by itself. the mirror is the start of the methodology. the rest of the methodology is the elevator. and, for the dishwasher contingent, the dishwasher.

the hot take is doing a small job here, which is to model what discipline looks like. you can apply it to tipping. you can apply it to a recurring social pattern. you can apply it to whether you answer a phone call from a number you have already declined three times this month. flat rules. that is the technology.

the four common shapes i kept seeing

i can name, not the people, but the shapes. the shapes are repeated. the shapes have, in my private file, names i made up on a tuesday.

• the calm corrector. they are not loud. they do not raise their voice. they correct. they correct your memory, your account, your version of where you were on a monday. they correct with patience. the patience is the entire trick. you can read more about the corrector in a long post on the slow erasure of your own version, which is the thing i closest have to a clinical document. it is, mostly, a folder named evidence with the word evidence on the cover.
• the louder cousin. the louder cousin is the engine with same a darker coat — sometimes, the harder cases of malignant narcissism are not subtle, and they do not need a long post to detect. they need a friend with a couch and a key.
• the credentialed version. these ones think they have a personality and you should be grateful for it. for that one, the more rigorous read is narcissist definition traits and and i’m fairly sure mine is mostly accurate, although in places it is just me being mean about furniture.
• the ambient one. the ambient one is the hardest. the ambient one does not, on any single tuesday, do anything detectable. the ambient one only shows up on the count. across months, the count goes down when they are around. the count goes up when they are not. ambient is the hardest because it lives below the threshold of any single conversation. you have to look at the chart over a long horizon. the chart is, frankly, the boss.

dave’s take, which i did not ask for

i mentioned the post-it to dave. dave is, structurally, the one i call when i am about to do something stupid like, for example, put a fork in the microwave or attempt a difficult phone call without preparation. dave laughed for straight minutes nine i timed it. dave’s theory is that the count is the wrong unit. dave thinks the unit should be the rent equivalent — meaning, what would each of these patterns cost me if i had to pay for them in dollars instead of weekends. dave is in insurance. dave thinks in dollars. dave is, on this, possibly correct, but i am not converting the post-it to dollars on a monday.

dave also, for the record, said i should call mom. i had not, in fact, called mom. i had been called by mom, which is a different transaction. dave knows the difference. dave will not press it. dave is the kind of friend who does not press. that is one reason i call dave on tuesdays. that is also one reason dave’s $300 is, technically, still on the books. we are not, on a monday, going to discuss it.

for the pop-culture authority i need by law in this post, i will reach for the late-2010s film about a small group of people whose patterns turn the room around them. that’s the cultural artifact. it does the job a clinical paper would do, more efficiently, and with better lighting.

verdict — the plural is the harder question

carla isn’t back. the quarterly review went long. that is, technically, a small win, although i am not, structurally, going to spend it well.

the affiliate corner of the post: there is a small countertop microwave i bought after the seventh died and you can find a similar one with the slow-rotating plate i quietly tolerate; if you click through, the platform gives me a tiny cut. funds the next microwave. it is honest work. you understand.

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