6 grandiose narcissist traits — the loud version examined

grandiose is the word for the version that walks into a perfectly ordinary room and announces what kind of bottled water it requires from the host. i used to find this funny in a story. then i lived with one for a stretch i would not recommend to a person i liked.

wednesday, 9:14am. carla is in an all-hands training on the third floor that, by the agenda someone left in the printer, will run until 11. the seventh microwave hummed for thirty seconds at 8:51 and then declined to keep going. there is, in the bottom left desk drawer, a small stack of certified letters i have not opened. the agenda said onboarding refresher in a font that suggested otherwise.

so the project at this desk, before anybody comes back from the third floor, is to draw the grandiose narcissist traits out as a side-by-side. the loud version. the version with a hat.

grandiose narcissist traits: a stable bundle of loud behaviors — performed entitlement, scripted contempt for ordinary work, a captive-audience monologue, public scorekeeping, name-drop receipts kept warm, and a costume held together by the fear of being plain. the bundle runs at full volume in the parking lot. the bill, at home, is the same bill the quieter version sends.

the table sits inside the larger building of a partner’s slow-motion editing of small household memories until you stop trusting your own week. the building has many apartments. today’s is the front-facing studio with floor-to-ceiling windows and a doorman paid to look impressed.

LOUD. IS. NOT. CONFIDENT.

1. grandiose narcissist traits, the working set

written this morning on the back of an unopened envelope from a credit union i do not bank with. six items. not a checklist. a marquee in flashing letters above a fine restaurant nobody needed.

1. performed entitlement on arrival. they enter a room as though it had been booked for them, and they have, for the second time today, been asked to wait. the door, the host, the lighting — graded inside eleven seconds. you watch the grading happen on their face.
2. scripted contempt for ordinary work. waiters, drivers, receptionists — receive a small line of theatre. “the place has gone downhill” is, in their mouth, a fact. it has not gone anywhere.
3. captive-audience monologue, ninety percent of dinner. a one-person podcast with intermittent commercials for the host. you are the audience, expected to laugh at jokes about a cousin you have never met.
4. public scorekeeping at full volume. a friend’s promotion is, at the table, immediately compared to a larger promotion of theirs from 2019. unprovoked. the friend is not present.
5. warm receipts, name-dropped on schedule. a name dropped every fourteen minutes — somebody from a conference, somebody who recommended a restaurant. the receipts get reheated in a microwave that, unlike mine, has not died seven times.
6. a costume held together by the fear of being plain. the watch, the jacket, the shoes — selected to make sure nobody mistakes them for the average person at the same restaurant. the costume is the trait. underneath, the engine runs on the fear that without it there is nothing the room would notice.

items one and two were the easy ones. three and four took a year and a wedding. items five and six i pulled half from observation and half from a longer essay i wrote about being stupid in public on purpose, which is, in a quieter way, the inverse costume. the loud costume hides plainness. the stupid one hides being seen at all. opposite costumes. same dressing room.

2. the comparative table, grandiose vs vulnerable, briefly

two columns, six rows. the same surface behavior shows up in the quieter cousin — the vulnerable, insecure version — wearing a cardigan instead of a hat. the table stops the conversation from collapsing into they were having a bad day.

the test, in apartment math, is cadence. one row leaning grandiose on a wednesday is somebody who had three drinks. four out of six leaning grandiose for nine months running, and the registration is the loud kind. four out of six leaning vulnerable for the same nine months, you are looking at a quieter dish. either way, the table is the post. the rest is footnote.

3. the drawer of certified letters as exhibit a

bottom left of the desk. inside, in no particular order, eleven certified letters i have not opened, going back to august. one from a court i do not recognize. two from the same address. several creased the way envelopes get creased when somebody at a counter folds them once before stamping.

the drawer is, in this post, exhibit a — because the loud version i lived with for a stretch had a drawer just like it. theirs was top right. theirs was, by their own description, not a real drawer. it was, in fact, a real drawer. the contents were not certified letters; they were small, dated complaints filed against them by people they had grandly insisted were jealous or unstable. eleven complaints. same drawer logic.

the drawer is the trait the costume cannot hide. the costume can run a dinner. it cannot, on a wednesday at 9am, sort eleven envelopes into now, later, and never. the costume’s solution is to keep the drawer closed and be louder above it. mine is to keep it closed and write a post about somebody else’s drawer. same architecture, either way.

the printer down the hall just woke up for somebody. the all-hands is, by my best guess, on a coffee break. carla will, at some point, walk past the desk on the way back, and i will minimize this.

4. the dm regret and maggie as separate footnotes

two footnotes, neither central. footnote one: a dm i sent, sunday in february at 11:47pm, to somebody from the loud version’s circle who had reached out. eleven paragraphs. i used the phrase captive-audience monologue. i used names. i pressed send before reading it back. read receipt at 11:48. no reply. the dm sits in the thread the way the certified letters sit in the drawer — written, sent, archived, never resolved. i am fairly sure it has been screenshotted and used as material at some dinner i was not at.

footnote two: maggie. three coffees in 2019, before she ran a small business with employees and payroll. maggie said, on the second of those coffees, that the loud kind “never get audited by the people they think they’re impressing”. i did not write it down. i remembered it months later in a parking lot. the audit, when it comes, comes from a quieter room and a longer memory. it arrives by certified mail. into the drawer it goes.

5. verdict, the grandiose kind is the loud kind in a hat

so where this lands, with the all-hands training due back in twenty minutes: the six grandiose narcissist traits drawn out above — performed entitlement, scripted contempt, captive-audience monologue, public scorekeeping, warm receipts, and the costume — are stable across the cases i have watched. they run at full volume because volume is the engine. the quieter cousin runs on the same engine with a different muffler.

my hot take, drawn from inside the experience: ignorance is, in this case, financial therapy. i do not have the bandwidth to open the drawer. the drawer can wait. i can, in the meantime, write a post about somebody else’s drawer, which is a perfectly valid use of a wednesday morning.

for the canonical, properly-acted version of the grandiose case at full volume — the costume, the table booked under the loud name, the contempt for the staff and warmth for the camera — watch the 2006 scorsese film about a boston detective with two careers and one extremely loud restaurant scene. the costume there is a wire and a leather jacket. the engine, underneath, is the same engine.

the seventh microwave just hummed again, briefly, then stopped. the all-hands is, by the elevator ding, releasing for lunch. minimizing this in three, two, one.

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