narcissist traits — 1 thorough investigation

traits, just traits, no qualifier, is what google suggests when you cannot bring yourself to type the longer phrase. i typed the shorter phrase at three a.m. last winter. the autocomplete already knew. the autocomplete has met my ex.

i am writing the working list of narcissist traits from the supermarket parking lot in my head and the desk i actually sit at. the supermarket is where the list started, on a wednesday at 6:48pm, between the bread aisle and the dairy fridge, while a number i did not recognize rang my phone and i, calmly, declined to answer.

this is meant to be a listicle. it will mostly behave like one. the eight items are below. before the items, the part where i explain why a list of narcissist traits is the kind of list a person writes after the relationship, never during, and what the gaslighting pattern from a relationship that ended in 2019 has to do with the price of bread.

writing this from the desk. carla is upstairs at the cross-functional sync about the cross-functional sync. i have, at most, the rest of the morning before someone needs the printer i sit beside.

narcissist traits, the working list (and why it took me a supermarket)

the list did not start in a book. the list started in front of the yogurt, when i realized i had been holding the same plain yogurt for four minutes and reading the back of the carton the way a person reads a contract. there was a missed call. there was a second missed call. there was a man at the register who said “rough day” and i said “no, just shopping” with the smile of someone who has been told he overreacts.

that’s where the list came from. you write the traits down later. you live them earlier. the typical traits of a narcissist are not, in my limited and self-administered research, exotic. they are, in fact, embarrassingly mundane. they are the small daily behaviors that, when added up across a year, produce a person who reads yogurt cartons in supermarkets to avoid the phone.

the supermarket aisle where this draft started, at 6:48pm

the aisle was bread. the call was from a number that has called my phone twelve times this month and never left a message. i pretended to compare two loaves with the same expiration date. i held the loaves. i looked busy. the second buzz came and i, in the cleanest example of phone dodged i have produced this year, slid the device into my coat and walked, slowly, like a man with a real reason to be there, toward the dairy fridge.

this is, technically, an investigation into the bank-app version of myself — the version who does not open the bank app for reasons related to the same number that calls. the unopened mail pile, on the kitchen counter, has been leaning toward the microwave for three weeks. the microwave is the seventh i have killed. the bread, in the end, was not the point.

the point was the calm. the calm i performed in the bread aisle was the calm someone taught me, by repetition, over years. that performance, when traced backwards, is the negative of a person’s narcissist traits — the bruise the body keeps after the original cause has moved on, possibly to someone with a volvo with seats that adjust in fourteen ways.

items 1 to 4, the obvious ones

these are the traits a podcast will name on minute three. they are real. they are also the easy ones. easy in the sense that you spot them on a stranger across a wedding. harder in the sense that you do not spot them on the person you go home with.

1. grandiosity dressed as opinion. every preference is a verdict. every verdict is final. the steak is wrong. the music is wrong. the hot dog is, controversially, not a sandwich, and the person making this argument is also somehow personally offended by the existence of the question. (the hot dog IS a sandwich, by the way; that is settled, on this site, in a different post; we will not relitigate it here.) the trait is not the take. the trait is the temperature of the take.
2. empathy on a delay. the regular human hears bad news and, within roughly a heartbeat, the face moves. the trait person hears bad news and the face moves on a slight delay, like a stream loading. the words eventually arrive. the eyes are still calibrating. you only notice this once. after you notice it once, you cannot un-see it.
3. entitlement in waiting rooms. the test is the doctor’s office, the line at the post office, the airport gate. nobody enjoys these. the trait person does not endure them. they perform a low-grade complaint, audible to the nearest stranger, that they are the wrong person to be here right now. the trait is the certainty that the inconvenience has, somehow, been customized for them.
4. the corrected memory. the most reliable of the typical traits of a narcissist is also the slowest to register. you tell a story at dinner. they correct a small detail. they correct another small detail. by dessert, the story is theirs and the small details have been re-painted. nobody at the table noticed. you noticed. you wrote it down on the back of the receipt and the receipt is in the wallet that i, technically, still carry.

those four are, again, easy. you can spot any one of them at a party, on a tuesday, with one drink. it is the second four, the bank-app ones, that take a year, sometimes three.

items 5 to 8, the bank-app ones

these are the slow traits. these are the traits that the calm hides. these are the traits where the friend, after wine, says “i’m worried about you” and you, with the patience of a hostage, explain that they are misreading the situation.

5. the private scoreboard. there is a tally being kept, in a notebook you cannot see, and the tally favors the keeper. you find out about the tally during a fight about the dishwasher when something you said in march of a year you do not remember is produced, with a date, like a piece of evidence. the trait is not the memory. the trait is the database.
6. aversion to apology that is not also performance. the trait person can apologize. they cannot apologize without also explaining why your reaction made the apology necessary. the apology has a footnote. the footnote is longer than the apology. the apology, reread on a wednesday, turns out to be a polite invoice.
7. hypersensitivity to slights nobody else heard. a comment a friend made in passing — about the steak, the music, the parking — is replayed, in a long quiet car ride home, as a coordinated insult. you, the passenger, are required to confirm the insult was real. confirming it is the test. failing the test means you are the one who never has their back. this is, you may have guessed, also one of the more common traits of a person worth keeping at a polite distance, in the conversational sense.
8. aversion to the bank app, metaphorically. this one is mine. the trait, in the other direction, was an aversion to looking at any account where a true balance might disagree with the preferred narrative. you ask, gently, “did we save anything this year?” you receive, calmly, an answer that does not contain a number. the answer was rehearsed. the bank app, theirs and now mine, stays unopened. (this trait, in fairness, also overlaps with the confidence-without-competence pattern, which is a different curve. the dunning curve is shaped like a hill. the bank-app trait is shaped like a closed door.)

i checked the items twice. i wrote the second four on a foolscap pad, the first four on the back of a 7-eleven receipt that included a banana i did not eat. the pad and the receipt agree, which is more than most witnesses do.

TRAITS. ARE. STABLE. PEOPLE. PERFORM.

and there’s a related instrument worth keeping near this list — the dunning kruger effect post i wrote earlier. dunning is what happens to the audit. kruger is what happens to the auditor. between them they explain why people who score high on this trait list will, on a good week, also rate themselves the calmest person in the room.

closing pulpit, the traits are stable and the supermarket is a teacher

here is the part i am supposed to put at the end. the part where i tell you what to do. i am not a doctor. a doctor is a person with a job. i write blog posts on a desk that is technically owned, on paper, by an entity i am not at liberty to name in this post. that entity has not asked me about the desk. i continue to use it.

but the supermarket, on a wednesday at 6:48pm, is a real teacher. it is where the body knows before the brain does. you stand in the bread aisle. you read a yogurt carton you are not buying. you let the call go to the voicemail that has been at capacity for the better part of a year. you walk, slowly, like a person who has not been corrected in front of friends, toward the eggs. band of brothers opens with a man saying you stop being scared when you accept you are already dead; the supermarket version of this is that you stop performing calm when you accept the calm was never yours to begin with.

carla just walked past the desk on her way to a meeting that is, i learned today, called “a working session.” she did not look down. minimized window or not, that is the friendliest data i will get this hour.

the phone, on the desk, has rung twice while i wrote this. the bank app stayed closed. the unopened mail pile, on the kitchen counter, is leaning a half-degree further toward the microwave that i have not, in fact, replaced since the seventh one died, and the receipt with the first four traits on the back is now folded into a wallet i carry mostly for the receipts.

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