narcissist characteristics male — 1 thorough investigation

characteristics male is search-engine grammar, which is its own dialect, and i have been fluent in it since 2019 when my english collapsed under the weight of what was happening. i typed in fragments. i think in fragments now. that is how this draft began — not at a desk, not at a keyboard, but in the margin of a six-month-old magazine in a waiting room with cold linoleum.

i am back at the desk now. it is 10:38 on a wednesday. carla is one floor up in a vendor briefing with the procurement team — the one where everyone says “circle back” twice and nobody circles back. that gives me, by my honest reckoning, the rest of the morning. the magazine margin is folded in my pocket. i am transcribing it.

writing this from my desk. the doctor’s office part already happened. the typing part is happening now, with the margin pages opened flat next to the keyboard.

so. the doctor’s office. yesterday. annual physical. forty-one minutes in the waiting room. there was a magazine — a small lifestyle quarterly with a kitchen on the cover, between an article about pickling and one about garage organization. inside was a one-page list titled “narcissist characteristics male: 8 to watch for.” i read it twice. what came up, which i did not expect, was that four of the eight applied, with embarrassing precision, to me — to a previous version of me, from before the unopened mail pile started leaning. the umbrella for all of this is what i wrote a while back about how gaslighting actually shows up in long relationships. that is the parent topic. this is what happens when you read the parent topic in a waiting room and recognize yourself.

FOUR. WERE. ABOUT. ME.

1. narcissist characteristics male, the disclaimer

i’m going to disclose, before i start naming items, that i am not a clinician. i am a man with a folded magazine page, a microwave i suspect is the seventh of its line, and a bank app i don’t open. the bank app is, by my private metric, the cleanest measure i have of who i am between paychecks. i don’t open it because it tells me things. those things are facts. facts, when ignored, become the structural material of a life. that is, in fact, the entire premise of the take i’ll get to in a minute, but the headline is: “ignorance is, in this case, financial therapy.” hold that thought for the doctor’s office part.

the items below are not clinical. they are narcissist characteristics male as a magazine quarterly understands them, which is to say: eight bullets meant for someone to nod at over coffee. the magazine was not wrong. the magazine was, in places, embarrassingly accurate. i am the reader and, on four of the eight bullets, i was also the subject. i’d like that in honesty before we go into the items, because the entire investigation depends on it.

the format the magazine used — eight bullets in two clusters of four — is what i’ll keep, because it’s how i read it and how i drafted it back. the first four cluster around the unopened-mail texture of avoidance. the second four cluster around the dm i regretted, which is its own micro-disaster. between them, four of eight applied to me. i’m naming which.

2. the doctor’s office where the draft happened in a magazine margin

the waiting room had two plastic chairs, a low table, and a stack of magazines arranged the way someone arranges magazines when they have already given up. the linoleum was cold. there was a fish tank without fish. the magazine was, by the date on the spine, six months old. narcissist characteristics male is not a topic that ages. neither is the kitchen on the cover.

i had no notebook. i had a pen. i drafted in the margin. the margin of a magazine is not a friendly place to draft — lines run vertical, then horizontal, then the article eats your handwriting. by the time the receptionist called my name i had four columns of fragments and a smudge from the heel of my hand. the doctor asked how i was sleeping. i said “irregularly.” he wrote that down. a doctor. a man with a job.

back at the desk now, the margin pages flat, i’m reading what i wrote. the handwriting is honest in the way handwriting is honest when nobody is watching it. the list below is what was on the page.

3. items 1 to 4, the unopened-mail ones

these four were the four that applied to me. i am putting them first, against the natural impulse to bury them in the middle, because the entire point of the investigation is that narcissist characteristics male is, sometimes, a mirror you walk past in a waiting room.

item 1 — the calm avoidance. the magazine called it “non-engagement under stress.” i call it the unopened mail pile. eight red envelopes are leaning, as of this morning, on a small console table near my door. the calm is real. the calm is also, when you look at it from outside, a posture. for years i thought it was patience. it was, in places, something else. the magazine had this as item one. so did the margin.

item 2 — the rewritten memory. the magazine called it “narrative drift.” i called it, in the margin, “the version i tell mike at the corner.” mike has, in his bar accounting, heard four of my versions of the same story. mike has not corrected me, because mike has not filed taxes since 2019 and has, by his own admission, forfeit the moral standing to correct anyone about anything. but mike has, several times, said “huh.” mike’s “huh” is not nothing. mike’s “huh” is, when added up, a verdict.

item 3 — credit drifts up. when something at work goes well, i write the email. when something goes sideways, i forward the thread. this is not a unique pathology. it is, however, on the magazine’s list, and it was on mine. the email i wrote in 2017 about the office printer migration, which i still cite at parties, was 60% mine and 40% a colleague who has since left. i present it as 100% mine. the colleague is in another city. the email is a fossil. fossils belong to whoever digs them up.

item 4 — the bank app i don’t open. this is the one that drove the whole thing for me. the bank app is the unopened mail’s digital cousin. i don’t open it because the number it shows is the consequence of decisions i made and prefer not to look at. “ignorance is, in this case, financial therapy” — i’m citing the take here because the magazine quarterly cited it too, in different words, in a sidebar about “men and their finances.” they meant something gentler. i mean what i mean. the bank app is the calm. the calm is the symptom. the symptom is the item. the item is on the list.

4. items 5 to 8, the dm-regret ones

these four did not apply to me. they applied to a man i once messaged at one in the morning, on a thursday, on a platform i’ve since muted, after he posted a thread about “the modern man’s eight rules” that i found, in the moment, personally insulting. i sent the dm. i regretted the dm by 1:08am. the dm sits in a quiet drafts folder labelled, internally, “regret tab”, which is what i named it later when i started naming folders. that man, however, is the host for items 5 through 8.

item 5 — the audience-tuned voice. on the platform, the man was thunder. in his replies, off-thread, he was patient and kind. switching the volume by audience is, the magazine said, a tell. it is also, mike has noted, the entire architecture of the corner bar — different conversations at different stools. mike concedes the tell is real and not a moral failing. for mike, it depends on the stool. mike is generous about most things and stingy about taxes.

item 6 — the small smile during disagreement. i was not in the room with this man. i did not see the smile. i imagined it, drafting in the margin, because the threads had the texture of someone smiling while they typed. the magazine described it as “affect-incongruent calm.” the margin called it “the smile.” the smile is, for me, the most reliable item on the list — the one i can spot from a distance, on a phone, through the small camera. i have never been able to do the smile myself. that is, possibly, the only thing keeping me out of items 5 through 8.

item 7 — explaining your job back to you. the man on the platform did this in a thread about the master, the 2012 paul thomas anderson film about a charismatic group leader, where he managed, in 11 tweets, to explain the film to people who had not asked. one of them was a film critic. the critic had written about the film. the man explained the film to the critic. that is item 7 in laboratory conditions. the magazine called it “didactic projection.” the margin called it “the explainer.”

item 8 — the missing suspicion. none of items 5, 6, or 7 was, by his bio, ever something he suspected he might be doing. the bio said “thinker. builder. truth-teller.” those three nouns, in that order, were the eighth item. the magazine called it “absence of self-suspicion.” the margin called it “the bio.”

(while we’re here — what i wrote earlier about what i mean by calling myself an idiot in the first place is the cross-cluster footnote to all of this. the word idiot, as i use it, is not a clinical descriptor. it’s a posture. an idiot, here, is the man holding the pen in the doctor’s office writing a list with four about himself. that is the entry on the dossier.)

5. closing pulpit, the characteristics are stubborn, the magazine was old

the magazine was six months old. the list was printed before i sat down with it. the items did not change because i read them. that is what makes narcissist characteristics male stubborn as a topic — the items are stable. the readers are not. the magazine promised eight bullets. it delivered eight bullets. four for the room. four for the man in the room. fair trade.

i’d like to leave the bank app where it is, by the way. i opened it once, this morning, as a one-time act of investigative honesty for this post, looked at the number, closed it, and went and made coffee in the kitchen near the seventh microwave — bought after the sixth had a small electrical event involving a fork. the seventh microwave is, in my private theology, the only appliance in my life that has not, at some point, been on the list.

carla just walked back past my desk, pretending not to look at the screen. she succeeded. the procurement vendors went well, by the small smile she allowed herself in the hallway. i minimized this. she did not say anything. one of the two signs.