define toxic people — (a thorough investigation)

plural is the trick. one bad person is bad luck. two is a pattern, three is a personality trait of yours, four is your social calendar, and five is a pretty embarrassing dataset to be sitting on at thirty-four. i am at four. i did not consent to being at four.

2:47pm, a thursday. carla is the in department roadshow on the third floor — yes, again, the review is its own infinite series — and i have, by my private estimate, thirty minutes if no one is asking.

so the imperative again: define toxic people. plural. and the plural is, as the cold open suggests, the trick. the verb define is, on most wednesdays, a futile exercise — every definition is provisional, every definition is going to be replaced by a better one when you live another year, every definition is a placeholder for the experience itself. that has not, historically, stopped me from writing posts. it will not stop me today.

define toxic people: in the plural, a recurring shape of damaging dynamic that shows up across multiple separate relationships in the same receiver’s life, over a sustained period, against the receiver’s preferences. the plural form is a category mostly useful for the receiver’s own self-inventory. the receiver is, structurally, the only person who can do the inventory. nobody else has the data. nobody else has the post-it. the post-it is in the kitchen, behind a magnet.

PLURAL. IS. WHERE. THE. SELF-AUDIT. STARTS.

i wrote the singular post yesterday and the day before, in different directions, and the singular has a clean test. the elevator. four seconds. honest assessment of whether your body just got smaller. the singular test is portable. you can run it on a tuesday in any building. the plural test is harder because the plural test runs on you. the plural test asks the receiver to look in the mirror. the receiver, on most wednesdays, would prefer not.

the verb define is, frankly, futile, and i am doing it anyway

here is my honest position, and you can take it to the bar with you. define is a verb that promises a clean edge. people are not clean edges. patterns are not clean edges. the word toxic is, in its current public usage, a smudge. people use it someone who for left dishes in the sink. people use it for the supervisor who scheduled the meeting on a friday. people use it for the parent who, at thanksgiving, made one comment that did not land. those usages are not, in my private taxonomy, the same word. they are the same noises in different mouths.

defining the plural form is, structurally, asking the receiver to look at four or five separate cases and find the shape across them. that is not a definition. that is a methodology. i’d argue, on most wednesdays, that the methodology is more useful than the definition. you do not need a clean edge if you have a clean test you can run repeatedly.

tom, in a separate file, would call this evasion. tom thinks every word should fit on a small card. tom keeps small cards. tom believes in small cards. i have, in the four years since i last had dinner with tom, come to disagree. some words do not fit on small cards. toxic is one of them. love is another. tuesday, surprisingly, is a third. you can fit the day on the card. you cannot fit the tuesday.

the productivity bro and the four-card answer

there is a productivity bro, online, in a vest, who has a four-card answer to the plural question. the four cards are, more or less: boundaries, communication, self-awareness, scheduling. the cards are color-coded. the cards are sold, separately, as a course. the productivity bro has, by my count, eight thousand followers and one yacht he rents for promotional photographs.

i will say this for the productivity bro: the four cards are not wrong. they are just not, on a long enough timeline, sufficient. you can run all four cards on a recurring pattern and the recurring pattern, sometimes, will continue. that is the part the four-card answer omits. some patterns do not respond to optimization. some patterns are people calmly telling you that the thing you remember did not happen, and you cannot, structurally, communicate your way out of that one. you can also not boundary your way out of it without, on a tuesday, leaving the room.

that hot take is the one i refuse to retract. plants are silent landlords. it explains every monstera i have ever bought. it explains, by extension, a portion of the recurring patterns. silent rent is the worst kind. you do not, on most days, notice you are paying it.

the four shapes, in plural

i described the singular shapes in another post. in the plural, the shapes show up as a kind of repeating melody. you start to recognize the chorus before the verse begins. the recognition itself is the data. the recognition is, in fact, useful — it lets you, in the four-second elevator window, decide what to do.

• the calm one, again. the calm one always shows up. you keep meeting them. they have different jobs and different cars but the calm tone is shared. the shared tone is the chorus. the verse is whatever they are correcting that day.
• the loud one with credentials. these are the ones with a job title attached to their identity in a structurally fragile way. the title does the work the personality cannot. the louder version, in clinical terms, is malignant narcissism, which is a stricter category, and not every loud one qualifies, but the louder ones tend to.
• the gentle drainer. the gentle drainer is not loud. the gentle drainer is not even unkind. the gentle drainer takes, in micro-doses, a small portion of every conversation, and over months the portions stack. you wake up on a thursday five percent dimmer than you were in march. that’s the drainer. they do not know they are doing it. that does not, structurally, change the math.
• the fool you stayed with anyway. the fool is not, by my taxonomy, toxic, but the fool can become a recurring pattern in your life if you keep stepping into the same shoes — the relationship to the long noble tradition of being a fool is real, and i’d argue every plural list of toxic people you have ever met includes one or two who were, fundamentally, fools you should have left after eight months. the fault, in those cases, is shared.

the audit i recommend, on a thursday

here is the audit. it takes thirty minutes. you take a piece of paper, you write five names, and beside each name you write three numbers: weeks of acquaintance, weekends measurably worse during that period, weekends measurably better after the relationship ended or attenuated. you total each column. you do not need a spreadsheet. you need a pen.

i ran the audit twice this year. the audit is, in my experience, more honest than any conversation i have had about the same five people with any of the other people in my life. paper is a better witness than a friend. paper does not, on a thursday, correct your wording.

for the cultural authority i am required to provide in every post, i’ll point at the workplace film about a recurring boss who turns the room around them — that movie does, in 102 minutes, what a clinical paper would do in 40 pages with worse pacing. it is, structurally, an illustration of the chorus. you watch it once, you recognize the melody, you recognize, on the way home, the five names on the post-it.

verdict — the plural is a self-audit, the chorus is the data

the department roadshow is, by the third-floor schedule, due to wrap any minute. carla is going to walk past the desk in approximately seven minutes. i am going to, by then, be in a different tab.

the post-it on the fridge is, since this morning, slightly more taped down. that is the small win. the count, since this morning, is unchanged. the count, on most days, is unchanged. that is also a small win. small wins are still wins. you take them.

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