list of characteristics of a narcissist — 6 row table

characteristics, plural, like an aspirational real estate listing on a slow tuesday. three bedrooms, two baths, no remorse, ample storage for grudges, parking included for guilt. i toured this property back in 2019 and signed a verbal lease in good faith. the security deposit is still being formally negotiated.

wednesday, 4:47pm at the desk. the budget review wrap-up is on the fourth floor and not, this afternoon, my problem. carla is somewhere between the printer and the kitchenette in a navy cardigan i have, on principle, never commented on. one airpod in; the other has been off-roster since february.

so the project at this desk, with the building emptying out and the heater making the small wheezing sound it makes after 4pm, is to draft the post about the working list of characteristics of a narcissist as a side-by-side. side-by-side is the only way the words stop sounding like a brochure and start sounding like an honest description of a person who is, somewhere right now, refusing to read the second paragraph of an email. lists alone read like fortune cookies. tables read like inventory you can actually carry.

list of characteristics of a narcissist: a working set of six recurring patterns — image control by audience, a private favor ledger, calm rewriting of last week, low-grade remorse on a flat line, undisturbed sleep on the bad nights, and a steady drift of credit toward them and blame toward the room. the list is six rows. the post is the table. the application is daily.

A. LIST. IS NOT. A. RESUME.

i need that on the wall before the columns are drawn. the laziest version of this conversation collapses every characteristic into “they had a rough patch”. a rough patch is a missed bus. a rough patch is not a four-year operating system that ships with its own bookkeeping department. the line is the duration and the architecture, not the volume.

list of characteristics of a narcissist, the working list i actually carry

the working version of the list of characteristics of a narcissist i actually carry, written on the back of a parking validation in the desk drawer, is six items. it has been nine, in earlier drafts of my own life. nine collapses to six when you remove the duplicates and the items i was using as a polite cushion for the harder ones. six fits on one screen. six fits in a notebook. six is what a person can hold in their head between the elevator and the lobby.

one: image control by audience — generous to the doorman, charming to the dinner guest, plain to you, by the time the elevator doors close. two: a private favor ledger that surfaces, fully written, in the first real disagreement, listing items you did not know were being counted. three: calm rewriting of last week, in their favor, delivered with the patient voice of a person reading from a teleprompter that has never been wrong. four: low-grade remorse on a flat line — enough to apologize for being late, never enough to repair the thing that mattered. five: undisturbed sleep on the night you cannot rest. six: credit drifting their way at the table, blame drifting toward the room, the weather, your friends, your tone.

the room this list sits inside is the slower one i wrote about a partner’s calm rewriting of small household memories until you stop trusting your own week. that piece is the foundation. this post is the inventory i carry on top of it — the list, then the table, then the part where carla walks past and the list, briefly, looks shorter than it is.

the comparative table — characteristics vs traits, briefly

somebody is going to ask, in the comments i do not have, what the difference is between a characteristic and a trait. the difference is small and almost entirely tonal. a trait is what a clinician writes down. a characteristic is what you tell mike at the bar after the third drink, when you have stopped using your therapist’s vocabulary and started using your own. they overlap by maybe ninety percent. the table below uses both, on purpose, because real conversations switch between them mid-sentence and pretend they didn’t.

two columns, six rows, no commentary in the table itself. commentary lives after the table, where commentary belongs.

one row leaning right-column on a hard week is not the inventory — that is a hard week. five rows leaning right-column for nine months running, with the same person at the other end of the same shared inbox, and what you have is a pattern with a postal code. it has an address. mine, in the version that taught me items one and two, was an apartment i no longer live in. the seventh microwave, currently half-installed in a kitchen drawer that has not been closed since sunday, exists because the sixth microwave died in that apartment and was never replaced by anybody but me.

and while we are inside the kitchen metaphor, a hot take from a smaller corner of the same head, cited rather than defended — “savings accounts are a hobby for the wealthy.” what does a savings account have to do with the list. more than i expected. the right column in the table is a balance you cannot see; the left column is a balance you ignore on principle. by year three you have learned to do both at the same time, on the same phone, while the bank app blinks in a corner of the screen.

the productivity bro list i screen-shotted to mock

somewhere online, this morning, a man in a quarter-zip standing in front of a rented kitchen island posted a carousel titled 9 characteristics of a narcissist (save this). nine items. one was a font choice. one was “uses big words”. one was “doesn’t text back”. the carousel had eleven thousand likes by the time i screenshotted it from my desk, on company time, with the budget review wrap-up still echoing somewhere down the hall on the fourth floor.

the productivity bro is not, on his own, a narcissist. he is, more accurately, a vendor. he sells the diagnosis in fourteen days for three hundred and ninety-seven dollars, plus a workbook with a leatherette cover. he is right that there is a list. he is wrong about which items are on it. items one and two on his list are vibes. items four through nine are repurposed dating advice from 2019. item three, fairly, overlaps with my item two — the favor ledger — phrased in a way that suggests he has, possibly, met one in real life and not just in a podcast clip.

the difference between his list and my list is that his fits on a square graphic and mine fits on the back of a parking validation. his is sponsored by a workbook. mine is sponsored by an apartment lease i did not renew. his list also does not include the slower household-scale erosion that the word toxic was invented to describe before it became, online, a verb. his can’t include it, because the slower version doesn’t photograph. his lighting is ring-light. mine is the kitchen at 11pm with the fridge open, deciding whether the leftover thing has crossed the line yet.

i screen-shotted the carousel, anyway, into a folder on my phone called “research”, which is, to be honest, where i put things i intend to mock and then, on average, do not. there are, currently, ninety-one screenshots in that folder. the third yoga mat under the sofa, which has not been unrolled since 2023 and is, possibly, fossilizing, would have an opinion about the folder if it had opinions; it does not.

maggie’s list of clients vs my list of these

maggie has, on her phone, an entirely different list. maggie owns a small business with a name on the door, a sign with proper kerning, and a spreadsheet of seventeen employees with payroll. when she pulls up the list at brunch — and she does, because that is what people who run things do, casually, between courses — it is sorted by start date and includes a column for benefits enrollment status. that is what an adult list looks like. it has columns the columns of which were intentional.

maggie, in 2019, drew the line for me between a difficult person and a person running a working operating system, in one sentence over the third coffee at a place that no longer exists. i wrote the sentence in the back of a notebook so i would not lose it. i lost the notebook. the sentence stayed. that is the trick maggie’s sentences have always pulled. she is, currently, running a payroll on time on the fifteenth of every month, while i am running a list of six characteristics on the back of a parking validation. the difference between her list and mine is that hers gets audited by an accountant. mine gets audited, briefly, by carla, who is now refilling her mug at the kitchenette, again, the third time since lunch.

i asked chatgpt, against my better judgment, for its own version of the list of characteristics of a narcissist earlier this week. i pasted four sentences of self-description and got sixteen items back, because the algorithm, like a well-meaning intern, never undershoots. five matched my notebook. four were repurposed advice about firing freelancers. seven were filler delivered with the confidence of a person who has never been wrong because they have never been there. i closed the tab. the parsley i had bought on saturday, for no reason, was still in a glass on my counter when i got home that night, which is, i think, also relevant here, in a way i cannot quite phrase before the cleaners arrive.

verdict — the characteristics are characteristics, the traits are traits

the cleaners just turned the corner with the cart. the budget review people are filing past my row toward the elevators in their wednesday-afternoon body language. carla is back at her desk pretending to read an email she has, almost certainly, already read. i am going to close this tab in ninety seconds. the seventh microwave is, at home, still half-installed.

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