i think i might be a narcissist — 1 thorough investigation

a thought arrived around two a.m. last week, uninvited, with no apology. the thought was: what if it is me. i have been investigating the thought ever since with the rigor of a man who has nothing else booked.

monday, 11:03am. the office is half empty for a compliance refresher i was not invited to. the chair is mine for, give or take, the next ninety minutes. nobody is auditing this keyboard. nobody is auditing the apartment either, which is part of the problem.

so. i think i might be a narcissist, typed into a search bar at 2:14am by people trying hard to be the protagonist of their own diagnosis. i typed it. this time not for a post. the longer building this room sits inside is the one on gaslighting and the slow indoor edit a partner mistakes for their own forgetfulness. that piece is the spine. this is one rib, with the suspect being me.

i think i might be a narcissist is, statistically, the sentence a narcissist almost never says, which the algorithm finds suspicious enough to flag the search as evidence in your favor. one moment of suspicion is data. four traits, repeating, is a pattern. the diagnosis itself belongs to a clinician with a credential i did not earn.

SUSPICION. IS NOT. A VERDICT. OR A LICENSE.

i think i might be a narcissist, the disclosure

before any of this, the disclosure. i am not a clinician. i have a desk, a wallet that does not close, a fridge running at a polite hum, and an apartment counter that handles my paperwork by ignoring it. the manual the shows i watch reference before commercial breaks has a chapter on this. i have not opened the chapter. my office wifi blocks the pdf on principle.

the suspicion arrived in the dark. earlier i had been on a phone call with mom — sundays, on schedule — and i had made the conversation, at some point, about a thing happening to me. she let me. she always lets me. she always lets me is the phrase that returned at two a.m. and stayed. by 2:14 i was at the laptop running searches a healthier man would not run.

the chatgpt self-test i ran the next morning

i did not stop at the search. by morning i had pasted, into a chatbot tab, a paragraph about myself in the third person. honest the way a man is honest at 6:14am with no coffee. i asked it to flag anything suggesting the writer might tilt toward the trait set in the title. it returned six items, lightly edited:

1. conversational gravity. i make a lot of conversations, eventually, about me. mom on a sunday call. dave on a wednesday. a barista who did not ask.
2. receipts kept silently. i remember favors i did. i forget favors i received. the imbalance looks like an accounting choice.
3. soft contempt for tom. tom owns. i rent. i have, in private, a position. the position is not generous.
4. absence of follow-up. i ask people how they are and forget the answer before the next question. i have been doing this for a decade.
5. public charm budget. at the corner with mike i am warm. in the apartment, alone, i am flatter. the gap is wider than it should be.
6. the schrodinger habit. half the things in my life are, by my own design, neither alive nor dead — the bank app, the voicemail full for eight months, the fridge i do not commit to opening.

i read the list. i did not save it. i had memorized it by item three. the memorization is, possibly, item seven.

the doctor visit i did not bring this up at, briefly

i had a doctor’s appointment thursday for an unrelated complaint involving a wrist. the doctor is a man with a job and a credential. on his way out he asked how i was doing generally. i said fine. fine is the word i use when i mean i am running a self-investigation in the background of my own face.

i did not bring up the suspicion. i had ninety seconds of doctor-time and a chatbot in my pocket. instead i asked about the wrist. the wrist would be fine. i walked the four blocks home reframing the visit as a missed opportunity, which is, the chatbot might note, item four with a costume on.

the broader category of person who would refuse to investigate this in front of a credentialed witness is held in the longer entry on what we mean by a toxic person, when the word stops describing a guy and starts describing a climate. this is the smaller question of whether i am one degree of that climate myself, on weekdays.

schrodinger’s fridge as a metaphor, briefly

the fridge in this apartment, older than my last relationship, has been making a sound for three weeks that a healthier man would have addressed. the food inside is in a state of suspended judgment — until i open the door, the leftovers from sunday are simultaneously fine and not fine. once i open the door, one of the two becomes true and i am responsible for it. so i do not open the door. i eat from the cabinet. the cabinet does not lie.

this is the shape of the suspicion too. i think i might be a narcissist is the door i do not want to open. as long as the question is sealed inside the search bar and the chatbot tab, both outcomes — i am, i am not — coexist politely. open the door, and one becomes the leftovers.

the seventh microwave, a few feet away, hums on. it heats things in ninety-second increments and does not ask follow-up questions, a quality i admire in appliances and have failed to adopt myself.

when the suspicion is data and when it’s drama

here is the careful part. self-suspicion is itself a small evidence point in the wrong direction — the loud version of this trait set tends not to suspect itself in writing at 2 a.m. so the suspicion alone is, mathematically, mild evidence of innocence. i should be relieved.

i am not relieved. that is also evidence. i can play this loop in either direction. the looping itself is closer to the cousin file at the longer entry on what it means to be a fool, where i argue the shoe fits me on most weekdays. fool is the softer noun. fool i can sit with.

the practical test, the only one i trust, is the one the chatbot would not write down. count the people who get small from being around you. count the people who get bigger. if the first list is longer, repeating — the suspicion has data. if the second is longer, the suspicion is drama. i ran the count. i will not share it.

the canonical version on screen is the husband in the 1944 picture gaslight on imdb, with charles boyer running the calm voice while the candles dim on a schedule. four of the chatbot’s six items, easily. i am not him. but i have, on a bad week, used a calmer voice than the situation deserved. that is not nothing. that is also not him.

verdict, the suspicion is interesting, the diagnosis is parked

compliance refresher over. somebody just walked past my desk holding a slice of birthday cake from a meeting i was, again, not invited to. the cake is, by my unqualified ear, the room’s verdict on item four.

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