narcissists trait — 1 thorough investigation

trait, singular, with no s on the end, is the version of this i actually prefer because it politely pretends there might only ever be one. there is, sadly, never only one of them. i learned this at a wedding i should not have attended in the first place. they served lukewarm chicken.

i’m at a sitting desk on a wednesday, pretending the cursor is in a spreadsheet. carla is upstairs at the all-hands prep — the meeting before the meeting before the meeting. roughly forty minutes of cover, give or take a hallway sighting. enough for one investigation, possibly less if the printer starts again.

the search box, in its infinite optimism, suggested narcissists trait when i typed something messier in 2019, in a different chair, after a relationship that later showed up in my long write-up about the calm voice that rearranges your memory. plural narcissists, singular trait. the apostrophe wandered off. that’s the form i’m working with, because once you accept the wandering apostrophe, you can get on with the question that actually matters: if you had to pick one, which one is it.

writing this from the desk, on company time, with the rest of the morning to make it count. carla on the third floor at the prep meeting. the cursor blinks honestly, the document does not.

i’ll get to the list. lists are for closers. before the list, the disclaimer, because the search box and i need to come to terms.

narcissists trait, the disclaimer about apostrophes

let me be clear about what i’m doing here. i’m not the apostrophe police. the apostrophe police are, statistically, also the people who think every meeting could be a 3-line email, and on that one i happen to agree, but that’s not the post. the search box is a populist. the search box knows what people type at one in the morning when they have just gotten off the phone with someone who corrected, for the eleventh time, a thing they remember saying. people don’t type narcissists’ trait at one in the morning. they type narcissists trait, no apostrophe, and then they hit enter, and then they wait.

i hit enter too, more than once. i did not find a clean answer. i found seventeen articles, four of which used the word “syndrome” and one of which used the word “spectrum” eight times in a single paragraph. i closed the laptop. i opened it again four years later, in this chair, on company time, with carla upstairs.

so this is the disclaimer. i am not a doctor. a doctor is a man with a job. i write blog posts on a desk that does not, strictly, belong to me. i looked up narcissists trait in the privacy of an incognito window. the looking-up was uncomfortable. i also asked mike, at the corner bar, on a tuesday, between his second and third beer. mike said one sentence. mike’s sentence is in the verdict. the rest of this post is me killing time until i get to mike’s sentence.

(mike has not filed his taxes since 2019. on this, however, mike was correct, and i need you to keep that in your head while i go on at length.)

the coffee shop where the apostrophe got me

before the list, a small scene from the field. this is not where i am writing from. i am writing from the desk. the coffee shop is where the question first found me, three weeks ago, on a saturday i should have spent doing literally anything else.

i was in the corner. the barista who knows my order had given me the order without asking, which is a form of kindness that is also a form of mild prison. i had a notebook open. i was, in theory, drafting an email i never sent. the man at the next table, on his phone, said the word narcissist. then he said it again. then he said it a third time, with the casual emphasis of a person who had recently learned the word and was test-driving it on a saturday.

he was telling someone — a sister, by the cadence — that his ex was a narcissist. then he corrected himself. “a textbook narcissist,” he said, with the weight of a man citing a source. then he listed traits. he listed twelve. he listed twelve traits in roughly three minutes. i counted on the napkin because that is what i do in coffee shops when other people’s lives become more interesting than my own. twelve traits. three minutes. one ex.

i thought, as i drank a coffee i did not really want, that twelve is a lot of traits. twelve traits is a personality. twelve traits is, in the worst case, a friend group. and i thought: if you stripped away the twelve and you had to keep one — if you had to pick the narcissists trait, singular, the one that does the work — which one would you keep? because all the rest, i suspected, were probably extras. the engine was probably one piece.

i did not say this out loud. i never say things out loud in coffee shops. i wrote it in the notebook. the notebook went in the bag. the bag went under the desk. the desk is here. so are we.

items 1 to 4, the textbook ones

i read four pages of three different books. one of them on the train. one of them while waiting for a doctor who was running, generously, an hour late. one of them on a kindle, which, if you ask the wrong people, doesn’t count, but my previous note about how toxic patterns repeat across formats already covered the format-snobbery angle, and i don’t want to relitigate it on a wednesday. four traits, from the textbook end of the spectrum:

1. grandiosity. the conviction that they are, in the relevant ways, exceptional. not in a hobby. in life. the regular human ratio of “i am okay at some things, bad at others” is, for them, a tax they refuse to pay. they are above the tax. they will explain this to you over dinner.

2. need for admiration. the praise is not a bonus. the praise is the meal. you do not feed them and they get hungry and then they get cruel. you can confirm this, if you have one in your life, by simply not complimenting them for forty-eight hours. observe the weather change. take notes. ignore my advice.

3. lack of empathy. they cannot or will not feel what you feel. it is not always cold. it is sometimes politely confused. you say you’re sad. they ask if you’ve eaten. you say you’re sad. they tell a funnier story to fix it. you say you’re sad. they buy you a thing. the thing arrives. you are still sad. they are confused.

4. entitlement. the assumption that the rules apply to other people. the line is for other people. the rent terms are for other people. the apology, when one is needed, is for other people to give them. they are owed. by everyone. forever. it is, on paper, exhausting. in practice, it is also exhausting.

FOUR. TRAITS. ALREADY. AND. WE. ARE. NOT. AT. THE. ENGINE.

items 5 to 8, the lived ones

those four are the ones the books like. those four are also, by themselves, just bad manners with a vocabulary. you can have a dinner party with a person who has all four and survive, provided the dinner is short and there is enough wine. it gets worse below the waterline. these are the ones i learned the hard way, with the third yoga mat watching from under the couch and the man who calls leaving voicemails on a phone that is now full to capacity at eight months and counting.

5. the calm denial. they don’t shout when caught. they reframe. the tone never breaks. the temperature of the denial is the giveaway. a normal person, caught, gets warm. they get cooler. they get patient. they explain, with the voice of someone speaking to a tired toddler, that you have remembered it incorrectly. on a wednesday. for the eleventh time.

6. the score-keeping. they have a database. they bring up something you said in 2017 during an argument about the dishwasher in 2024. the database is current. the database is queried. the database has indexes. you do not have a database. you have a folder on your phone called “evidence”, and you regret naming it that, but it’s too late now.

7. the friends-shrinkage. count the people you used to call. count the ones you have stopped calling, this year, with no clean reason. if the number is more than two, that is data. they did not, technically, ask you to stop. you stopped. that is, in fact, the technique.

8. the size adjustment. you, after a few months, are smaller in rooms. quieter at dinners. less likely to mention the thing. you laugh shorter. you eat faster. the body keeps the receipt even when the brain misplaces it. a friend will, on a tuesday, say “are you okay?” and you will not know what to say, and that not knowing is the answer to the question they didn’t ask.

closing pulpit, the apostrophe matters less than the trait

here is what i’d tell the version of me from 2019, sitting in a different chair, before the wedding with the lukewarm chicken, before the third yoga mat, before the seventh microwave, before mike, before the folder on the phone called “evidence”:

do not waste the search on the apostrophe. narcissists trait, narcissist’s trait, narcissists’ trait — the search box does not care, and you should not either. the apostrophe is grammar. the trait is the engine. the engine is the certainty. spend the saturday on the engine. close the laptop on the apostrophe.

and do not bother counting to twelve. frasier crane would have counted to twelve. frasier crane, a fictional psychiatrist with a brother and a dog and a radio show, would have given you a clean numbered list with the appropriate caveats. i admire that. i envy it. i’m not going to do it. the world does not need another twelve-trait list typed by a man on company time with carla upstairs at a meeting that could, frankly, be a 3-line email.

the world needs the engine. the engine is one trait. the trait is the certainty. everything else, including the eight items above, is the engine running.

(my dad used to say “if you can’t fix the engine, drive a different car.” he was wrong about a lot of things. he was right about that one. i am still in the wrong car. i am driving it slower now.)

am i saying every difficult person is a narcissist? no. that would be lazy thinking, and lazy thinking is a separate post for a separate wednesday — the kind of specifically dumb shortcut my cousin tried at thanksgiving when he diagnosed three relatives between the turkey and the pie. you are not your cousin. don’t be dumb on the diagnosis. be patient. count to one. find the engine. that’s the trait.

mike, at the bar, on a tuesday, said: “the trait is they think they’re right. that’s it. that’s the whole thing. all the other stuff is just them being right at you.”

mike has not filed his taxes since 2019. on this, mike was correct.

carla just floated past with a coffee. screen flipped to the spreadsheet in time. she didn’t slow down. statistically that lands in the okay column. probably.

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