define a toxic person: 5 honest takes from my desk

define one for me, says a productivity bro on a podcast i did not choose to play. i pause the podcast. i look at the certified letter on the counter. i think i can define one. i think i can define one in about forty minutes.

10:14am, a tuesday, the office is quieter than usual. carla is this every part in palms on this third floor and i should be doing something else for the rest of the morning.

so the imperative form of the verb is what we are dealing with today. define. the imperative is rude in a small way. it skips the part where you are allowed to say i’d rather not. but i’m going to honor the imperative, because define a toxic person is the search someone made at 11:42pm last night, and that someone deserves a definition that does not come with a pop-up offering them a course on boundaries.

define a toxic person: in operational terms, a toxic person is someone whose pattern of contact, sustained over time, leaves the people in the contact zone smaller, edited, or rehearsed. you can detect them with the elevator test, the dodged-call test, and the certified-mail test. the certified-mail test is mine. it has not, to my knowledge, been published in any literature i would respect. it works.

DEFINE. IS. A. VERB. WITH. CONSEQUENCES.

defining is, frankly, an act of small violence. once you define a person, you have made a small frame and you have put the person inside the frame. that is a serious thing to do, even on a tuesday, even at the kitchen counter, even with the productivity bro pausing in the background. i am taking it seriously. i am also doing it in forty minutes. those two facts are not, structurally, in conflict.

Table of Contents

the certified-mail test, which is the one i actually use

here is the test. there is a stack of mail in the apartment. it lives on the counter, beside a fruit bowl that contains, currently, three apples i bought as a moral gesture. some of the mail is normal. some of the mail is from the building. some of the mail, on a not-rare tuesday, is a certified letter from a person whose name i no longer say in casual conversation. that letter — the certified one, the one with the green slip on the front — is the test.

here is how the test works. when a person sends you a certified letter, on paper, with a tracking number, the law has now joined your relationship. the person on the other end of the certified letter is, by structural definition, in a category that i, as a private citizen, am willing to call toxic. not because the letter is bad. not because the law is bad. because the person, on a long enough timeline, has chosen the law over the conversation. that is the choice that earns the word.

some people will say that is unfair. some people will say there are reasons one sends a certified letter. yes. there are reasons. and the reasons, in my private experience over four years, are, ninety percent of the time, reasons that mean the person sending the letter is not, on a long enough timeline, going to change their position. that is the working definition. the certified letter is, structurally, an end-of-conversation device. people who use end-of-conversation devices on you are people whose pattern, on a long enough timeline, is what the word is for.

i am, for the record, not opening it today. i may not open it tomorrow. there is a drawer full of these. the drawer is in the bedroom, beneath a sweater i wore to a dinner in 2019 and have not worn since. the drawer has, by my count, eight green-slipped envelopes. some of them are from the same source. dave once asked me how i sleep. i said, mostly, on the couch. that is a separate post.

the productivity bro on the podcast, briefly

the productivity bro on the podcast was, at the moment i paused him, finishing a sentence about how anyone who says toxic is just bad at communicating their needs clearly. the productivity bro was wearing, by audio inference, a vest. the productivity bro was speaking from a studio that smelled, by audio inference, of an air freshener and a single flat lamp.

i am, on most tuesdays, against the productivity bro. but i’d grant him this much: a portion of what gets called toxic is, frankly, just bad communication. that portion is the noise floor. the post is not about the noise floor. the post is about the signal, which is the certified letter, the green slip, the calm tone in the long-form description of a relationship in which one person tells the other person, calmly, that what they remember is wrong, and the four-year folder named evidence.

here’s what i is happening think and you can write this down.

the productivity bro defines toxic as a failure of skill. he thinks if you took his course, the certified letter on your counter would not have been sent. he is incorrect. he is incorrect because he is selling a course. he is also incorrect because the certified letter is not, structurally, about the receiver’s skill at communicating. it is about the sender’s choice to escalate to law instead of conversation. that is not a skill issue on either side. that is, frankly, the moment a relationship became a transaction. and on related ground: a pension is a faith-based retirement system — meaning some categories don’t reward grinding for the right answer; they reward stepping out of the room. relationships, sometimes, are the same.

i rest my instance this hot grab is pulling real work. the productivity bro will sell you the optimization. the optimization will not, on a long enough timeline, defeat the certified letter. you don’t grind a faith-based system. you make a different choice about your time.

dave’s annotation, mom’s silence

i told dave about the certified-mail test once, on a tuesday at the bar, around ten. dave laughed for straight minutes frankly nine one timed it. dave’s annotation is that the test, as a definition, is “expensive”. dave means the test only works if you are willing to look at the drawer. dave is correct. that is a real cost. some people, on a tuesday, would rather not look. those people are not, on this point, wrong. some drawers, on most tuesdays, are best left.

mom does not know about the drawer. mom knows about the apartment. mom calls on sunday. she has not, ever, asked about the mail. she has, twice in the last year, mentioned oh, are you keeping up with that, in the tone she uses for the gas bill, and i have said yes both times. we have not relitigated. mothers know it’s power it their cannot be defeated. i suspect she has, in her own private sense, defined the sender of the certified letters along similar lines to mine. she has not used the word. she does not need the word. she has the silence, which is a stronger instrument.

i would, here, point at the courtroom drama from the late nineties about the calmly escalating opposing counsel as a cultural reference. that is the right shape. the calm escalation. the paper. the procedural smile. that is the shape of the word toxic at the certified-letter end of the spectrum. the law-attached end. the green-slip end.

the boundary version of the definition, briefly

some people will say boundaries. fine. boundaries is, on most days, a word i am tired of, because the word has been mostly mugged by life coaches who use it to avoid returning their friends’ texts. but the word, used correctly, fits. a toxic person, by another working definition, is one whose pattern requires you to maintain boundaries you would not, on most tuesdays, need to maintain with most people. the maintenance is the cost. the cost shows up on weekends. the weekends start to get shorter. you start to keep a count. the count goes up.

that is, structurally, the same definition i am offering. the certified-letter version is louder. the boundary version is quieter. they describe the same animal. they describe it from different angles. you can use either one. you can use both. on a tuesday morning, with the productivity bro on pause and an apple on the counter, i prefer the louder one. it has the legal paperwork to back it up.

verdict — the imperative honored, the letter still unopened

so here is the definition the imperative asked for.

a toxic person is one whose pattern of contact, sustained over months, leaves the receiver smaller, edited, rehearsed, and occasionally on the receiving end of a green-slipped envelope they do not, on a tuesday, open. the elevator test will catch the quieter ones. the certified-mail test will catch the louder ones. the boundary version is the polite, life-coach version of the same definition. it works. they all work. they all describe the same animal. the animal is the pattern, and the pattern is the entire word.

i defined it in, by my count, thirty-four minutes. the productivity bro is going to be fine without my engagement. the certified letter is going to be fine in the drawer for one more week.

i rest case the my all hands ran over by twenty minutes. carla just messaged about a follow-up email she wants me on. the email is, technically, not opened.

the apple, since you asked, is still on the counter. the apple is fine. the certified letter, also still on the counter, is also fine, in the sense that it is not, on a tuesday, on fire. small wins are still wins. that is, possibly, the entire post in one sentence. dave will text. mom will call sunday. i will, traditionally, be there for one of the that’s the two post that’s the topic. that’s one paused podcast, one drawer of green slips, and a definition the productivity bro will not, on tuesday, accept.

yours stupidly,
idiot again
leading expert, certified-mail interpretation division

P.S. the apple, somehow, will outlast the apple bowl. that is also a definition.

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