narcissist behaviour — 1 fairly sure investigation

behaviour, with the british u, sounds slightly more clinical and slightly less accusatory than the american spelling, and i am, this morning, going to take any small advantage on offer. i am about to make accusations of a substantial size. the extra letter will help with the tone. that is the hope.

at my desk. carla is in the q3 review on the third floor — the one with the slides that nobody reads and everyone forwards. i have, optimistically, ninety minutes before someone realises the spreadsheet is not, in fact, opening itself.

i’m starting this draft after a doctors office visit i’d like to forget. nothing serious. they took my blood pressure twice, the second time slower, the way you take a temperature on a child you’re worried about. i sat in the waiting room for forty minutes, on a chair that was technically a chair, reading an old magazine about kitchens. while i was there i wrote four lines in pencil on the back of a clinic flyer about a person i used to live with. those four lines are the spine of this post.

so. narcissist behaviour. the working set. i’ve been collecting it, against my will, for years, the way some people end up with a coin collection because a relative kept giving them coins. i did not ask for the coins. the coins arrived. the coins are now sorted into envelopes. some of the envelopes are red. one is open on my desk now, behind the laptop, which is a separate problem.

narcissist behaviour is a sustained pattern, not a single monday. it shows up as a calm voice that edits last week, a need for admiration with no off-season, empathy that arrives slightly off the beat, and a steady project of looking good to other people. forty episodes, no apology, is the pattern.

BEHAVIOUR. WITH. THE. U. IS. STILL. BEHAVIOUR.

i looked it up before writing this — not in any clinical handbook, because i am not a clinician and the manual they reference on the shows i watch is not, frankly, designed for me — but in the wide sense, as a man at the bar, with a beard, would describe it. for the foundational reading, here is the long-form note on gaslighting i wrote earlier this year. that one and this one share a folder. the folder, on my phone, is named “evidence”, and yes, i know how that sounds.

narcissist behaviour, the working set (the four lines from the doctors office)

the four lines i wrote in pencil, in the doctors office, on the back of the clinic flyer, were these. one: they correct your memory in a calm voice, repeatedly, until your memory begins to feel like something borrowed. two: they require admiration the way a houseplant requires sun, with no off-season. three: they treat your inner state as background noise, until your inner state is background noise. four: when you raise the pattern, the pattern becomes a story about you.

that’s the working set. four lines, written on a stiff piece of paper printed by a clinic, while a baby cried at a polite volume next door. i underlined number four twice. i remember underlining it twice. i’m sure of this because the pencil broke on the second underline and i sharpened it with my keys. i mention this so that, later, when i tell you about the algorithm and the second opinion, you understand the conditions of the original report were, for once, sober.

the british u is doing real work. narcissist behaviour sounds like a category. narcissist behavior sounds like a complaint at the bar. the difference is a single letter. the difference is, also, the difference between describing a pattern and accusing a person, and i would like, for the length of one thursday, to be doing the first thing.

i’m linking the longer note on what a toxic relationship actually is here, because the working set above is downstream of that one. you don’t get to narcissist behaviour as a category until you’ve sat with the bigger family tree first. read in the order you find them. or don’t. i am not, today, the boss.

the doctors office where this draft happened in pencil

the doctors office is, structurally, a place designed to make you doubt your own reporting. they ask you, on a clipboard, to rate your symptoms one to ten. one for nothing. ten for unbearable. the form does not allow for “i would put a six but i’d like a second opinion from chatgpt before committing”, which is what i wanted to write in the box. so i put a four. fours never get follow-ups. fours are the safest number on a clipboard. i learned that from a friend who works in a clinic. i’m not naming the friend.

while i was waiting, i did what i do in any environment with seating and a clock — i replayed three conversations from a relationship that ended, by my best guess, between 2019 and 2021. i won’t relitigate. i will only note, plainly, that the calmness was the tell. it always is. a real disagreement has heat. narcissist behaviour, in my experience, has a temperature like the inside of a tax envelope. you do not feel hot. you feel shrunken.

tom would have a tidy list, i have the algorithm

tom — university friend, married, two children, volvo, a pension he understands, the kind of pension you can describe in a single sentence without cracking — would, if i told him about this post, do the polite, dangerous thing. tom would print a list. tom would make the list bullet-pointed. tom would put it in a folder named “narcissist_behaviour_v2” and review it on a sunday with a coffee that he made on a machine that is paid off. tom would not have an unopened red envelope on his desk. tom would not have a voicemail full at eight months and counting. tom does the homework. i have the algorithm.

by which i mean: i ran the four lines from the flyer through chatgpt — a second opinion at three in the morning — and chatgpt, helpful and slightly tired-sounding, returned six bullet points and a softly-worded warning that “self-diagnosis is not a substitute for professional help”. i thanked it. i’m fairly sure i thanked it. i then asked the algorithm — the wider one, the one that runs the feed, the one that decides what i see at midnight — for similar content. the algorithm, sensing weakness, gave me eleven videos of people in ring lights describing patterns of narcissist behaviour with the calm tone of weather presenters. one of them said something useful. it took the other ten to filter out which one.

tom owns. i rent. tom has a manual coffee machine. i have a longer dossier on the characteristics of the narcissist that i wrote at this same desk, also while carla was in a meeting, also against company policy. we are both valid. mine has more naps. mine, also, has the seventh microwave, which arrived after the previous six, and which i am protecting like a man protecting a small political cause.

behaviours 1 to 5, the algorithm-detected ones

here are five — not nine, not seven, not the official threshold — five narcissist behaviour patterns that returned with the highest confidence from a night of feeding flyer-pencil notes to a chat window. they are not exhaustive. they are also not original. they are the ones i recognised so fast that i closed the tab before reading the rest. behaviours one to five, in the order the algorithm served them.

1. controlled correction. they don’t argue with you. they correct you. politely. on a monday. about a thing you remember. the correction is not the goal. the habit of correction is the goal. once you accept their version of last week, you stop trusting your version of next week. that’s the door. they walk through it.
2. narcissist controlling behaviour around small choices. the dinner reservation. the route to the restaurant. the colour of the chair. they will not present this as control. they will present this as preference, on a steady drip, until your preferences have, somehow, evaporated. you will hear yourself ordering a thing you don’t like. you will think this is your taste evolving. it is not.
3. image-management as a full-time job. what your friends think of them is not a side concern. it is the central concern. dinner-party performance is high. private decompression is brutal. the difference between the two voices, if you isolate them, is, frankly, frightening. (this is also, separately, why narcissist boss behaviour is the office variant — the public face for clients and the back-office face for direct reports. they’re the same engine. only the audience changes.)
4. empathy on a delay. they will, if pressed, perform empathy. it will arrive, however, slightly off — like a translation done by a competent stranger. it does not feel like empathy. it feels like the shape of empathy, drawn from memory, by a person who has watched empathy on television.
5. the rewrite. when the relationship ends, your role in it changes overnight. you become, by the end of the first week, the person who was difficult. the person who was sensitive. the person who, if anything, “had their own things going on”. this is the rewrite. you are the bug. they are the user. you are not invited to read the patch notes.

five behaviours. one thursday. one flyer. one pencil. tom would have eight. tom would also have made you a coffee while explaining them. i’m not tom.

for the bonus round — narcissist woman behaviour, narcissist boyfriend behaviour, narcissist boss behaviour, all the long-tail variants the algorithm offers up at midnight — the patterns are, structurally, the same. the wrapper changes. the engine doesn’t. anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you a wrapper.

verdict — the spelling changes nothing, the behaviour stays

here is the verdict. the british u is cosmetic. the american spelling is cosmetic. the behaviour is not cosmetic. narcissist behaviour, as a pattern, is consistent across cultures, across spellings, across the kind of houseplant you keep on the kitchen counter. you can rename it. you can soften it. you can put a serif on it. the engine underneath is the engine.

i’m going to do something that some people consider unfair, which is borrow another hot take to settle this paragraph. “ironing is a class war”. that one is mine and you can have it. i’m citing it here because narcissist behaviour is also, structurally, a low-grade war about who has to do the labour of remembering correctly. the gaslighter outsources the remembering to you, then audits it. the moron — and that’s a separate post, see my earlier note on the word moron — at least has the honesty of not pretending to remember anything. there is a small dignity in being a public moron. the narcissist does not have that dignity. the narcissist has a clean shirt and a calm tone and a seat that adjusts in fourteen ways.

cinematically, if you want a long-form study with better lighting than my flyer, the canonical text is the four-season case file titled “succession”. logan roy, in particular, is the working set above with a private jet. the calm correction. the controlled small choices. the empathy on delay. the rewrite. all of it, in tailored wool, with better dialogue than your relationship had. i have watched it twice. the second time was, technically, research.

my group chat — the one with university people, including tom — has been muted since 2024. i muted it after a thread in which one member, calmly, told another member they were misremembering an event that the rest of us had, in fact, remembered correctly. it was, in miniature, the entire post you are reading. the group chat is still there. i open it once a quarter. i read three messages. i close it. that, also, is a behaviour. it is not narcissist behaviour. it is, more accurately, survivor behaviour, which is a separate longer post and which i will not, today, write.

the voicemail, by the way, has been full for eight months. i have not cleared it. some of the messages are from the person whose behaviours i have been describing for the last thousand words. i will not be clearing the voicemail today. clearing it would be a kind of reading. i am not, today, doing reading. i am doing writing. one verb at a time.