nine narcissistic traits — 1 thorough investigation

nine narcissistic traits is the count i landed on after a week of writing them on a napkin and crossing them off when they were too generous. they were mostly too generous. i kept the strict ones. the napkin survived two coffees.

i am typing the rest from the desk on a thursday, while carla is at the all-hands prep on the third floor, which is the meeting before the meeting and the one nobody calls a meeting. i have, give or take a refill, until ten thirty-eight. that is enough time to stage a list and not enough to defend it twice. one defense per post. household rule.

before we get into the nine, a register note. there is a version of this query that uses the digit, and a version that uses the word. the digit version is what people type at one in the afternoon between two browser tabs and a sandwich. the word version is what people type at eleven at night with the lights off, because the word looks more careful, and a careful search is a search where you are also asking yourself the question. i know which one i’m answering today. i’m answering the careful one. it’s a different room than the long one i wrote about the patient denial pattern that ended a relationship in 2019, but the wallpaper is the same.

writing this from the desk on a thursday. carla is at the all-hands prep on the third floor. the napkin from monday is, at this hour, taped to the inside of the second drawer.

nine narcissistic traits, the disclaimer about spelling

spelling first, because spelling is the only thing on this post that has a right answer. nine is the word. 9 is the digit. the words are not synonyms even when they are. typing the word slows the hand down by one beat, and one beat is sometimes the difference between a list and a verdict.

i did the search both ways. i am the kind of person who does the search both ways and then makes a chart. the chart is on the napkin, with the rest. the digit gives you slideshows. the word gives you longer paragraphs and, occasionally, an apology in the second sentence. that is not nothing. an apology in the second sentence tells you the writer has met someone and is still recovering.

so the editorial position, for the nine i’m about to give you, is the careful one. i am giving the list once, plainly, and then i am defending the count and not the items. the items are not mine. the count is mine. i crossed three off the longer list because the longer list was greedy, and i added one back because envy belongs on every list of this type, and any list that does not include envy is a list written by someone who has not yet been envied.

here is the working set, no warranty:

1. grandiosity — a sense of self-importance that does not check itself for evidence.
2. fantasies of unlimited success, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love — the daydream is the engine.
3. belief in being special — and only understandable by other special people, ideally with letterhead.
4. need for excessive admiration — the room must clap. the clap must be loud and counted.
5. sense of entitlement — a permanent skip-the-line energy with no awareness of the line.
6. exploitation of others — using the people nearest to reach the things farthest, with no pause for the using.
7. lack of empathy — unwillingness, not just inability, to recognize the feelings of other people.
8. envy — believing others envy them, and envying others while denying it. it goes both ways. it always does.
9. arrogant, haughty behaviors — the giveaway, the one that makes the other eight visible to a friend across a dinner table.

the post office i avoided that fed the draft

i wrote the long version of this list during a week in which i was, in a serious and deliberate way, avoiding the post office. there was a parcel notice taped to the apartment door, and the parcel notice had a date on it, and the date was, by the time i found it, three days into its useful life. i did not go. i did not go on tuesday. i did not go on wednesday. on thursday i wrote two more items onto the napkin and crossed one off because writing felt more responsible than going.

the post office i avoid is two blocks east of the building i would prefer not to name. it is small. it has a queue that, in my experience, has never moved in a direction that flattered the people standing in it. the parcel could be a return, or a certified letter, or a magazine subscription i forgot to cancel. it could be from the man who calls. it could be from a service i no longer use. there are a number of theories. theory generation is a trait of mine that i would put on a personal list of nine if i were writing one, which i am not, today.

i mention the post office because the napkin draft of these nine narcissistic personality traits got longer every day i did not go. avoidance is a productive state for some kinds of writing. not all kinds. not the kinds with deadlines. but lists, particularly lists like this, can grow in the time you are not picking up a parcel. the parcel is, at the time of writing, still uncollected. the parcel may be from anyone. i have stopped guessing. guessing is its own pathology, but it is a pathology i know how to spell.

items 1 to 4, the dm-regret ones

traits one through four are the visible ones. i am calling them the dm-regret ones because they are, every single one of them, the kind of trait that, if you have any of them yourself in any quantity above zero, you can detect by reviewing your sent folder. mine is reviewable. it is not, today, going to be reviewed by me.

there is a dm i regret. i sent it on a sunday at two in the morning, which is the time of day at which traits one through four take the wheel and drive the car straight into the lake. the dm was a paragraph long. it was a defense of a position nobody had attacked. it was sent to a person who, by sunday morning, had not asked for one. grandiosity wrote the first sentence. fantasy of being understood wrote the second. belief in being special enough that the recipient would be flattered wrote the third. need for admiration wrote the fourth. all four, in the same paragraph, in the same hand. i sent it. it was read. it was not replied to. that is data.

i am not saying, to be clear, that one regrettable dm makes a person a narcissist. i sent that dm. you sent one too. probably more than one. the difference between the dm-regretter and the cluster-carrier is, again, the cluster. the dm-regretter wakes up on monday and feels embarrassed and writes nothing for a week. the cluster-carrier wakes up on monday and writes a follow-up.

also, while we are on the subject of corrections, let me put this on the record where it doesn’t quite belong: showers over 4 minutes are theatre. i am aware that this is unrelated. it is not entirely unrelated. a person who insists, with a calm voice, that the eight-minute shower is a non-negotiable and the four-minute one is a moral failure, in your bathroom, on a thursday, is exhibiting trait five before they get to traits one through four. the entitlement is in the insistence.

items 5 to 9, the chatgpt-summary ones

items five through nine are the structural ones. i am calling them the chatgpt-summary ones because i did, in fact, ask ChatGPT for a summary of these five, late on a wednesday, the way other people ask their dentist for a second opinion. the summary it returned was tidy and missing the texture, which is what i would expect a summary to be. i pasted it into a document. i deleted the document. i wrote them again, by hand, on the napkin, which is the only document i trust.

entitlement is the trait that explains why someone you know never apologizes for being late. exploitation is the trait that explains why their problems are everyone’s problems and your problems are thursday’s. lack of empathy is the trait that explains the calm voice during the apology that wasn’t an apology. envy — both directions — is the trait that explains why your small wins make the room cold for ten minutes after you tell it. and arrogant behaviors is the trait that, when finally spotted by a friend across a dinner table on a thursday, retroactively clarifies the previous four.

i will say something embarrassing, which is that the second opinion from the chatbot is, in fact, an embarrassment of the trait list itself. asking a piece of software to validate a hand-written list of nine items is a behavior that lives inside item three (belief in being special) and item four (need for admiration), with a dash of item one. i am aware. i did it anyway. ignorance is, in this case, financial therapy, which is a hot take i have made elsewhere and which applies here because outsourcing the napkin to the chatbot is cheaper than asking an actual person to read it and tell me i’m being dramatic. the chatbot does not tell me i’m being dramatic. the chatbot is polite. that’s the trade.

NINE. STAYS. NINE. THE WORD. AND. THE COUNT.

i should also mention, while we are on lists and rooms and the look of a person who has been counting wrong: there is a film called her, with a man who outsources his sentence-writing to a piece of software and ends up surprised by the bill. that look on his face — the late-arriving look of “i think i counted this wrong” — is the look i had at one in the morning watching the chatbot summarize my own napkin back to me with two of the items missing.

closing pulpit, the spelling changes nothing, the traits stay

this overlaps, in places, with the earlier post about the long-running self-applied diagnosis i keep filing under the working title of idiot, because the dm-regretter and the idiot at two in the morning are sometimes the same person at the same desk reviewing the same sent folder. the difference is the count, and the willingness to keep the count honest.

carla walked past the desk. window minimized. parcel notice still on the apartment door. the seventh microwave is, at this hour, on the kitchen counter at home, unrelated. the third yoga mat is under the couch, unrelated. moving on.

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