nine traits of narcissism — 1 investigation

nine traits of the noun narcissism is what you get if you build the list from the inside out, starting with the central thing and working outward. the central thing, in my version, is a man who never apologizes for the chicken.

i am, against the better judgment of payroll, at my desk. it is 11:23am on a thursday. carla is in an all-hands on the third floor, the kind that runs long because somebody printed slides. i have, in any honest reading, forty minutes before she comes back smelling faintly of toner and bad coffee. the seventh microwave is also at home, watching nothing, while i, here, attempt to write down what the phenomenon actually is as a noun, instead of pointing at a person.

this is a phenomenon list, not a person list. the difference matters. a person list reads like a wanted poster. a phenomenon list reads like a constellation chart for a sky you can’t quite stop staring at. for the personal-portrait version, i already wrote my longer field notes on the characteristics of the narcissist as a singular human, which is the same content from the opposite end of the telescope. this one is the noun.

writing this from the desk while carla is upstairs in the all-hands. the unopened mail pile has shifted overnight. it now leans southeast. i am taking that personally.

1. nine traits of narcissism, the working list

i kept a working list. the list lives in the same notes folder where i keep grocery items i never buy, names of bands i meant to look up, and the rough draft of a complaint to my landlord about the radiator. the nine traits of narcissism were not always nine. they were, at one point, twelve. then six. then eleven. then nine, because nine was the count i stopped fiddling with on a wednesday in march when i had to leave for the gym, by which i mean the sauna, by which i mean the part of the gym where you sit and sweat without anyone asking you to lift anything. the list went with me. it always does.

before i go on, the calibration line. i covered the bigger pattern earlier in the pillar piece on the gaslighting playbook, which is the prequel to all of this and the reason any of it makes sense. the present list is the inventory. the playbook is what you do with the inventory once you’ve memorized it.

nine traits, in this post, in this order, with the aesthetic decision i made on tuesday: items 1 to 4 are the ones productivity_bro would post about online if he were honest, which he is not. items 5 to 9 are the ones the unopened mail pile teaches you, slowly, on tuesdays, between bills you keep folded under a paperweight you bought at an estate sale because you watched a war drama where men kept lists in foxholes. that’s how you become someone who keeps lists at a desk.

2. the gym sauna where the heat made me write this

about the sauna. i pay for a gym membership i use almost exclusively for the sauna. there is a treadmill there. i have nodded at the treadmill. the treadmill has nodded back, in the way of inanimate objects who have given up. i go to the sauna, i sit, i drip onto a towel that the building provides, and i think. that is, technically, the workout.

the sauna is, for our purposes, where the trait-list crystallized. not literally — i don’t bring a pad in there, i’m not insane, paper would warp into a soup of gym-bag fibers — but mentally. heat is a clarifier. you sit, your shoulders drop, the radiator-clicking part of your brain quiets, and what remains is the residue of every conversation you replayed in the shower at 7am. the residue is the list. the list is the trait inventory. the inventory is what we are doing here.

i should also mention the third yoga mat, briefly, because it matters to the geometry of the apartment if not the article. the third yoga mat is still under the couch, and the couch is still over the yoga mat, and the apartment continues to function. i note this only because productivity_bro, who is not real and lives only on a feed, would have me roll out the mat between sauna sessions to do “mobility work”. productivity_bro does not understand that the mat is, at this stage, structural.

3. items 1 to 4, the productivity-bro ones

these are the loud four. the visible ones. the ones a feed would call out by accident if a feed could see itself.

1. grandiosity in the room. the trait, not the person — the air in a space changes when grandiosity walks in. voices recalibrate around it. people start agreeing pre-emptively. you can feel the recalibration even when the carrier of the trait is not, technically, the loudest in the room. that’s the giveaway. the room adjusts.

2. an entitled tone on everyday requests. every ask phrased as an assumed yes. “you’re getting that for me, right?” — half question, half schedule. the tone does the work. the words are decoration. once you tune your ear to it, you hear it everywhere, including in voicemails that have been sitting in my voicemail full for eight months from a number i no longer want to identify.

3. a soft empathy gap on small things. not on funerals. on tuesdays. you say you slept badly; the topic moves on within a sentence. you say a friend is sick; the topic returns to a story they’ve been waiting to tell. the empathy gap on the small ordinary stuff is the diagnostic. funerals are easy. tuesdays are the test.

4. a steady appetite for admiration. not a binge. a baseline. the conversation drifts back to them the way a magnet drifts to north. you stop noticing for a while. then one wednesday at 11:23am you do, and the noticing does not unnotice. that, in fact, is one of the bitter gifts of a trait inventory: once you’ve named it, the name stays named.

4. items 5 to 9, the unopened-mail ones

these are the quieter five. the ones the unopened mail pile teaches you, the way an unopened mail pile teaches you anything, which is by sitting there for months until you read it on its own terms.

5. envy that hardens into resentment. the trait isn’t envy on its own — envy is human, even the ex with volvo guy probably envies a man with a fourteen-way seat. the trait is the second step: envy that, given a week, narrates itself into the conviction that the envied thing was unfairly distributed. the story rewrites the world to fit. retroactive resentment is the technical term i would use if anyone had given me a technical title.

6. calm-voiced reframing of facts. the patient correction. the soft “you’re remembering it wrong.” real arguments come with heat. patient denial is its own engine. by the time you notice the pattern, you’ve apologized for things you didn’t do six wednesdays in a row.

7. denial as default posture. not lying as a tactic. denial as a stance. you arrive with a photograph; the photograph is reframed. you arrive with a receipt; the receipt is “out of context”. HT28 says “the taxman sends letters in serif font” — there is something similar in this trait, in that the typography of denial is always calm. the stance is the font. the font is what stalls you.

8. a quiet ledger of your past mistakes. the tally. brought out in a fight you did not know was scheduled. something you said in 2017, retrieved on a thursday over a dishwasher disagreement. you have not thought about 2017 in three years. the ledger has. the ledger is the appendix to the calm voice in trait six.

9. a paranoia that tells the previous eight where to point. the world, in their telling, is mostly aimed at them. this is the trait that organizes the other eight. without it, the inventory is exhausting; with it, the inventory is dangerous. it is the through-line. it is the line that turns nine separate items into a single shape.

NINE. TRAITS. ONE. SHAPE. NOT. A. SENTENCE.

5. closing pulpit, the traits travel with the mail you ignore

carla is back in twelve minutes by my generous estimate. window minimized. shoulders dropping. the all-hands has run long, which is, statistically, neutral.

the gym is in two hours. the sauna will be empty at 1:38pm because at 1:38pm normal people are at lunch. i will sit. i will sweat. i will think about whether the list should have been ten. it should not. nine survived march. nine survived me.

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