narcissist signs — 1 thorough investigation

signs, plural, is the gentle phrasing of this entire question. signs, plural, is what we say when we actually mean: things i should have noticed at the time that i clearly did not notice in 2019. i am about to make a fresh list out loud. the list is mostly about me, regrettably.

the writing position, for the record: my desk, the same desk, on a wednesday at 10:38am, while carla is upstairs at the all-hands prep on the third floor and the rest of the floor is doing whatever they do when carla is upstairs. i have, as best i can estimate, the rest of the morning. that is enough time to make a list, fail at it, and pretend it was a draft.

the reason i’m writing this now, and not last week, is a phone call from dave that came in at 9:14am on the second ring, which is dave’s signature ring — first ring is a wrong number, second ring is dave, third ring is the man whose calls i no longer answer for reasons i would rather not specify on this site. dave wanted to know if i was, and i quote, “still doing the thing where i make lists about my ex.” i said no. i was lying. i am, in fact, doing the thing right now, only with a focus keyword and a meta description. growth.

writing this from the desk. carla is in the all-hands prep upstairs. coffee at the second mug, lukewarm, which is a kindness because hot coffee on company time is a sign i’m taking this too seriously.

narcissist signs, the working set i could draft in a queue

so here is the thing about narcissist signs as a category. they are not a checklist that arrives on a card in the mail. they are a slow accumulation of small weirdnesses that, taken in isolation, sound like a tuesday, and taken together, sound like a project plan. that is the upgrade. that is what makes them tricky to spot in real time, which is the only time available, since real time is when the relationship is happening.

i am compiling this working set from three sources. one: my own folder, which still exists, on the phone, named “evidence” with the optimism of a man who thought he was joking. two: the back-room reading i’ve done on the gaslighting pattern that lives next door to this whole topic — see my pillar post on the gaslighting pattern from a relationship that ended in 2019 for the long version, which is, frankly, where most of this universe lives. three: dave, on the phone, at 9:14am, with opinions.

the working set is below. it is not exhaustive. it is not clinical. it is what a man with a desk and a deadline would scribble on the back of a foolscap pad while pretending to format a spreadsheet. consider it a draft, the way every list i make is a draft, including grocery lists.

SIGNS. ARE. NOT. PROOF. THEY. ARE. PERMISSION. TO. LOOK.

the atm where i drafted half of this in line behind a man arguing with his card

about a week ago i was at the atm. not the atm i prefer — that one was out of cash for the third time this month, which is a separate complaint — but the atm in the lobby of the building two blocks over, the one with the screen that has been dim since 2022. there was a man in front of me. the man was arguing with his card. the card was winning. the man was on the phone with what i assumed was his bank and what turned out, based on tone, to be his sister. i waited fourteen minutes. fourteen. i counted because there was nothing else to do, and i don’t open my bank app on principle, and the line behind me had gotten patient in that way lines get patient before they get ugly.

i drafted the first six of these signs in the queue, on the back of a receipt from the supermarket where i had failed earlier, with a pen i borrowed from a woman who was very kind about it. she did not know she was contributing to a blog post about narcissist signs. she will, hopefully, never read this. she had a kindness that the man at the front of the line was, in real time, demonstrating he did not have. he kept telling his sister, calmly, with the patient voice of a person who has never lost an argument, that she had remembered something incorrectly. it took me four minutes to recognize the tone. it was the tone. it was always the tone.

i did not finish the list at the atm. i finished it at my desk, which is where lists are supposed to be finished, with proper margins and a coffee within reach. but the atm, the receipt, the borrowed pen, and the man on the phone — those are the conditions under which the first draft happened. for a topic this domestic, that felt right.

the dave phone call that fed the list, and what dave said about doctors

dave called back at 9:47am. dave does this. dave will end a phone call cleanly, agree we are done, hang up, and then call back inside the hour because something occurred to him in the elevator. this time the something was a doctor’s office story. dave had been at a doctor’s office last week dealing with what he was, with limited insight, calling his dunning matter, and the receptionist at the front desk had, in dave’s telling, all of the signs i had just been listing, only as a customer-service strategy. dave used the phrase “professionally calm.” dave is not a professional anything, but on the calm thing, dave is right. and the slug, with the dunning and the kruger sitting in their right place, was the receipt of the story he was telling.

dave’s contribution to the working set was a single observation, which i will lift here directly: “if every story they tell about themselves has a villain, and the villain is always somebody else, that’s a sign.” dave said this. dave then asked if i had three hundred dollars i could lend him. i said i did not. dave said he was joking. dave was not joking. dave still owes me three hundred dollars from a different conversation that happened before dave learned i had a tab open on this topic.

doctors. mc3. the frasier doctor’s office episode covered roughly the same emotional territory and resolved it in twenty-two minutes. mine did not. mine resolved in three years and one folder. growth, again, but slower.

signs 1 through 5, the doctor’s-office-grade ones, written for a layman, by one

i am not a doctor. a doctor is a person with a degree, a parking spot, and an office that smells like a clean photocopier. i write blog posts on company time. these are different jobs. with that disclaimer in cement, here are the first five signs from the working set, ordered by how often i missed them in 2019:

1. the calm correction. they tell you, in a patient voice, that you have remembered something wrong, and the patience itself is the trick. genuine disagreements come with heat. the calm one is running on a different motor. once you notice the motor, you cannot unnotice it.
2. the borrowed credit. a story you told them in march comes back, in june, as a story they tell, with the parts that made them look unflattering removed and the parts that made you look unflattering kept. you sit there listening, doing the math, and the math comes back unbalanced. the receipts do not match. you do not say anything. that is also a sign, but a sign about you, which we will get to.
3. the friends getting smaller. not yours getting fewer, at first. theirs. then yours. you notice you have stopped calling two people you used to call weekly. you tell yourself you got busy. you did not get busy. busy people don’t have time to rehearse arguments in the shower, and you have time for that, so the busy theory falls apart on inspection.
4. the apology that is also a counterattack. “i’m sorry you feel that way” is the entry-level version. the advanced version is a four-paragraph apology in which, by paragraph three, you are the one who has done something wrong, and by paragraph four, you find yourself drafting a response that begins “you’re right, i should have.” you are not right. you should not have. you have been turned around inside your own complaint.
5. the tally. they remember, in fights, things you said in 2017 that nobody else remembers. you do not have a tally. you have a folder. these are different. one is a database, one is a coping mechanism, and the asymmetry is the entire problem.

there are more — the working set has eleven, the foolscap had nine, the receipt had six — but five is what fits in a section, and the rest of the morning is finite. the microwave plate doesn’t need to spin, on a related and unrelated note, is the hot take of the week, but i digress, and i am about to digress further if i do not move on.

verdict — the signs are everywhere, the diagnosis is yours

so here we are, at the bottom of the post, with a working set, an atm story, a phone call from dave, a doctor’s-office anecdote, and five items pulled out of an unstable drawer of memory.

i am not telling you to diagnose anyone. that is not my job. it is, frankly, not yours either, unless you have the parking spot and the office that smells like a photocopier. i am telling you that narcissist signs are useful in the way that a streetlight is useful at three in the morning when you’ve lost your keys: not because the light explains the situation, but because the light lets you look. the diagnosis is yours, in your own life, with your own folder, your own friends, your own quiet rooms. the signs are everywhere. the work is yours.

i’d like to say that recognizing the signs in 2019 would have changed the shape of 2019. i don’t believe that. recognizing the signs would have changed how i told the story to dave at 9:47am on a wednesday seven years later, which is, on balance, not nothing, but is also not the time machine i was, briefly, hoping to find inside an atm queue.

the seventh microwave, for the record, is on the counter where the sixth used to be. the voicemail is, also for the record, full. has been for eight months. these things are not signs. these things are the conditions under which lists like this one are made. the conditions are mine.

carla just walked past the desk on the way to the printer. window minimized. no comment from her side, which is the column that statistically lands in the okay range, probably.

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