examples of a narcissist — 1 thorough investigation

examples, in the plural, is what your therapist politely asks you for to make sure you are not catastrophizing about a person. i was not catastrophizing in 2019. i had four examples then. i have nine examples now in 2026. that is a worse trend, statistically, than i would prefer to admit.

i am writing this from a desk that is, technically, mine until 5pm. it is a wednesday, the clock on my screen says 10:14am, and carla is on the third floor at an all-hands about an all-hands. i have, by a generous read of the calendar, the rest of the morning. that is enough time to make a list. it is not enough time to live the list, which is the entire problem with the list.

the wall of insults audit happens whenever a new example arrives. today an example arrived. the wall, digital, will be revised by lunch.

so this is a listicle, and i’d like to apologize, in advance, for the format. i did not invent the listicle. i did, however, come around to it. people scan. people scroll. people, on a wednesday, do not have the patience for an essay about examples of a narcissist when what they need is a list of nine of them with a sentence each and a tone that admits the writer was, in two of the examples, a willing participant. that’s this post. let’s go.

examples of a narcissist: a working list of nine common patterns — the credit-taker, the calm denier, the silent treatment expert, the rule-bender, the pity-spinner, the score-keeper, the linkedin self-quoter, the apology that is not one, and the one who makes every story about themselves, even yours, even the one about your mom.

the first thing you should know is that i am not a clinician and this is not a quiz. i am a man with a folder on a phone and a wall of digital insults pinned to a private url. i looked the term up. i read parts of two articles, then i closed the tab because the cursor was lingering. the broader pattern of gaslighting and other things my ex insists never happened is the pillar i’d send you to first if you wanted the architecture. this post is the inventory. the architecture got its own thursday.

examples of a narcissist, the working list (and why nine, not ten)

nine, because ten would round too cleanly and rounding too cleanly is, on a wednesday, a form of lying. nine, because that is the number i have. when the tenth arrives, and it will, i’ll add it to the wall and not the post. the wall does not require revisions. the post does. that is the difference between a private archive and a public one.

the working list, in a sentence each:

1. the credit-taker. they were not in the room when the work was done. they are in the room when the credit is given.
2. the calm denier. they correct your memory in a voice so even it sounds like the manual.
3. the silent treatment specialist. they leave the conversation. they do not leave the apartment. you feel them anyway.
4. the rule-bender. rules are for other people. their exception is, in their telling, a moral category.
5. the pity-spinner. every conflict ends with their suffering being the larger one.
6. the score-keeper. a fight about the dishwasher contains a reference to a thing you said in 2017.
7. the linkedin self-quoter. they post their own sentences in the third person and tag themselves.
8. the apology that is not one. “i’m sorry you feel that way” — the entire grammar there is a defense.
9. the universal protagonist. your story about your mom becomes, by minute three, a story about them.

nine. that’s the list. write it down. or don’t. i did. it is on a post-it on the standing desk at which i sit. the post-it is curling. that is a classic moron move on my part, choosing the cheaper adhesive at the bulk place, but i’d rather be the moron who chose poor adhesive than the man who paid for premium adhesive on company time. the post-it stays curled. i remain unrepentant.

the coffee shop where the wall of insults gets revised

the coffee shop is on the corner two blocks from the office. i go there at 10:38am most weeks because at 10:38am the morning rush is over and the afternoon rush has not arrived and the barista, a person who knows my order without asking, can be relied upon not to perform small talk. i bring a notebook. the notebook is the analog version of the wall, the one before the digital one, and it is where the examples of a narcissist get triaged before they make it to the public file.

today’s example was example number nine. i will not tell you who. i will tell you what. example number nine, in summary, said the words “i never said that” about a sentence i had a screenshot of, with a timestamp, in a thread that was still active on my phone. they said it with the calm. it was the calm that flagged it. without the calm it would have been a tuesday.

the wall of insults, for the uninitiated, is a digital archive. it lives at a url i will not share. people pay five dollars to be insulted by me. i print it. i print it meaning the algorithm prints it, technically, into a digital frame, which is, technically, a fridge magnet for the post-paper economy. the wall is also where i keep, in a separate folder, the examples. the examples are not insults. the examples are evidence. the difference matters to me. it would not matter to a court. fortunately we are not in a court. we are in a coffee shop.

examples 1 to 4, the tom-corroborated ones

tom is not in the post per se. tom is the contrast group. tom owns a house. tom has a wife. tom drives a volvo with seats that adjust in fourteen ways. tom has a pension that, when described, makes me feel like a man who has been doing his finances inside a microwave he no longer owns, on account of having killed the seventh microwave on a tuesday i’d rather not talk about. tom is wrong about most things. tom is, however, not an example. tom does not keep score. tom keeps a calendar. it is a different file.

i ran the first four examples by tom on a phone call i did not, technically, want to have, but tom called and i picked up because tom owns and i rent and there is, somewhere, an obligation in there i cannot identify but feel anyway. tom corroborated four of the nine. the four he corroborated were:

example one — the credit-taker. tom said: “i had a guy like that at work. left the meeting. came back at the end. asked if we needed anything. we did not.” tom did not need to elaborate. the silence after said it. tom hung up to do something with a sprinkler. the credit-taker, in tom’s telling, is so common it is barely a category. it is climate.

example two — the calm denier. tom said: “isn’t that just everyone?” tom is wrong on this. it is not everyone. but i could see how a man with a volvo and a pension might mistake the calm for the air. the calm is rarer than the air. the calm is a choice. the air is what’s left.

example three — the silent treatment specialist. tom said: “my wife does this. i hate it.” this is the most personal sentence tom has uttered this calendar year. i wrote it down. i did not press for details. tom is, in this matter, an unreliable narrator about himself but a reliable narrator about the silence.

example four — the rule-bender. tom said: “is that not just a person who is good at meetings?” tom is, again, partially wrong, but here he was approximately 30% right. some rule-benders are corporate. some are domestic. the corporate ones go on linkedin. the domestic ones go in your folder. the taxman sends letters in serif font, by the way — that is HT28, the hot take that lives in my head whenever the rule-bender invokes a special exception for themselves. the taxman does not bend. the taxman uses a font. that is integrity in document form.

examples 5 to 8, the wall-of-insults ones

the wall of insults audit, which i conduct most fridays from a desk that is ostensibly mine for that purpose, threw up four entries this quarter that map to examples of a narcissist. these are the wall-of-insults ones, which means they have been paid for, somewhere, by a stranger, and pinned to a digital surface i look at on tuesdays.

example five — the pity-spinner. from a paid insult that read, in part, “you are the kind of person who, when they spill the coffee, finds a way to be sad about it longer than the cleanup takes.” this is the pity-spinner in compressed form. the conflict is theirs. the suffering is theirs. the cleanup is yours. the cleanup is also, statistically, theirs to do, but they are too sad to do it. the third yoga mat, still under the couch since 2023, has watched several pity-spinners in action. the third yoga mat declines to comment.

example six — the score-keeper. from a paid insult: “you bring up the receipts, but only your receipts, and only when it suits you.” an unpaid version of this insult was delivered to me by my own ex on a thursday in 2018. the paid version was sharper because the paid version was anonymous and the anonymous, unlike the partner, has nothing to lose by being right.

example seven — the linkedin self-quoter. from a paid insult: “you are the man who shares his own posts with the caption ‘this’ as if anyone needed the prompt.” this is, in fact, my friend dave. dave is not a narcissist. dave is, however, on linkedin, and on linkedin, the line is thinner. the line between a difficult man on linkedin and a man giving the silent treatment over linkedin is sometimes, frankly, a single notification. the platform makes examples of us. that is its business model.

example eight — the apology that is not one. from a paid insult: “you are the kind of man who apologizes by pointing at the weather.” i felt this one. the apology that is not one is the apology that names a third party as the cause. the weather. the traffic. the day. the meeting. the apology that is one starts with “i” and ends with a verb the speaker performed and the listener received. the apology that is not one starts with “i’m sorry that you” and ends with the listener’s feelings being the topic. you can spot it on a tuesday. it has a tone. the tone is calm.

CALM. IS. NOT. THE. SAME. AS. SORRY.

for the on-screen documentation of all eight examples in one body, the kendall roy character on succession runs the inventory in roughly two episodes. the show is unflinching because the writers have, somewhere, met one of these. the writers room functions, in part, as a wall of insults compiled by people who left the room first.

example nine, the universal protagonist, plus a verdict

example nine is the one i added today. example nine is the universal protagonist. you tell example nine a story about your mom. example nine listens for, generously, twelve seconds. example nine then tells you a story about example nine’s mom, which becomes, in minute three, a story about example nine, which becomes, in minute five, a story about an injustice example nine experienced in 2014 that has, somehow, the same emotional shape as your mom’s surgery. you nod. you go home. you write it on a post-it. you stick it on the wall.

i have, in my calmer years, tried to argue that the universal protagonist is just bad listening. it is not. bad listening looks at the phone. the universal protagonist looks at you. the universal protagonist makes eye contact while reframing your sentence into theirs. that is the upgrade. it is, in the literature i’m fairly sure exists, sometimes a separate diagnosis and sometimes the headline trait. either way, you can spot it. you can spot it before the third sentence.

the wall of insults file is open in another tab. example nine has been added. the third yoga mat is, as of this morning, still under the couch. the seventh microwave is, as of this morning, dead. the count is the count.

carla just walked past the desk on her way back from the all-hands prep meeting. she did not stop. she did not say anything. that is, statistically, two-thirds of a good sign and one-third of a very bad sign. i’ll know which by 2:14pm. probably. i have, on this matter, a track record of being wrong on the first read and right on the eleventh. i am working on shortening that interval. it is a multi-year project. the project does not, technically, exist on any company plan i have access to, but it is, on a wednesday, the most important one i have.

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