red flag narcissist — 1 explainer, sort of

a flag, in this metaphor, is exactly what it sounds like, and the color is exactly what it sounds like, and yet for some reason in 2019 i decided to describe the flag i was looking at as burnt orange. i was wrong about the color.

i am writing this from the desk while the annual planning meeting eats the third floor and carla with it, which gives me a window of approximately fifty minutes before someone notices the empty chair. it is 10:14am. the dishwasher is, as ever, judging me from a distance of one kitchen and one workday.

the post you are about to read is, technically, a defense. of a hot take. about appliances. that turned into a defense of a different thing entirely, which is what happens when you try to write about a red flag narcissist at a desk that is not your own life.

red flag narcissist, the disclaimer

let me get this out of the way. i am not a doctor. i am not a manual. i am a person at a desk who once described a clearly red flag as burnt orange and then spent six years telling people it was a complicated color situation.

the term red flag narcissist gets thrown around like everyone agreed on what it means, which they did not. for our purposes — and the purpose right now is to kill the next forty minutes before the meeting empties out — it is the person whose warning signs were on the porch, with a brass nameplate, the day you walked in.

i looked it up, in the way that i look things up, which is to say i opened a tab, asked ChatGPT to summarize the term, and then closed the tab before reading the answer because the dishwasher made a sound i did not recognize. ChatGPT, as far as i can tell, agrees with me. or it agrees with the version of me that asked the question. either way, agreement.

so. disclaimer logged. flag noted. color, in this case, red.

the desk where the dishwasher metaphor came to mind

here is the scene. the desk is the desk. the chair is the chair. the laptop fan is doing its little aria. the apartment, which is not here, contains a microwave_seventh — the seventh microwave, by the running tally i pretend to keep on the inside of a cabinet — and a third_yoga_mat that has been under the couch since 2023, possibly developing opinions of its own.

none of these objects are speaking right now. but the dishwasher, in spirit, is. the dishwasher is the one i listen to.

i had this thought walking back from the kitchen — and you have to understand, the kitchen is fifteen feet from the desk that is not this desk, the kitchen counter, the surface i am pretending is also a desk — that if you put a person on a porch and let the porch judge them, the porch would be more honest than i was in 2019. porches do not negotiate. dishwashers do not either. an appliance does not care that the flag is technically a complicated shade of orange under specific lights.

somewhere in there, the metaphor formed. the dishwasher is a cabinet that judges you. the porch is a deck that has receipts. a red flag narcissist is a person standing on the porch waving the flag, and you are inside debating fabric.

the dm regret, briefly, that triggered the defense

so i sent a dm. this is the part i’d rather not narrate but it’s load-bearing.

the dm went out at 9:08am yesterday, to a person whose username i will not type and whose profile picture is a sunset over a body of water that is probably a lake, and the dm said something to the effect of: “appliances have better instincts than i do, and i’d like to put that in writing somewhere public.” i then watched the read receipt land. i then closed the app. i then opened the app. i then closed it again, eight times, in a sequence that the data scientist inside ChatGPT would describe as a pattern.

the regret was instantaneous. the regret was also, in retrospect, the wrong regret. the dm was correct. it was simply early. you do not message strangers your dishwasher epistemology before noon. you do not message them after noon either, as a rule, but the rule is more enforceable in the morning.

this is, by the way, why i am writing the defense. the dm cannot be unsent. the post can. but the post will not be. the post is the longer version of the dm with footnotes and a hot take.

the hot take defense, item by item

the hot take is this: the dishwasher is a cabinet that judges you.

let me defend it, because that is the format here, and because i once watched a defense argument unfold on frasier and decided that pacing a room counts as rhetoric. (it does. i checked.)

item one. the dishwasher knows what you put in it. the dishwasher knows you did not rinse. the dishwasher saw the fork situation and said nothing. silence, in an appliance, is judgment.

item two. the dishwasher will not be hurried. you can press start. the dishwasher will start when it decides. this is not a malfunction. this is a temperament.

item three. the dishwasher uses water, electricity, and time, which are the three currencies of an apartment. you are paying for its opinion. you do not get to argue with the bill.

item four, and this is where it ties back to the red flag narcissist: the dishwasher does not gaslight. it tells you exactly what it thinks, by humming, by stopping, by leaving a wineglass with a smudge that says “you handed me a wineglass, what did you expect.” compare and contrast.

a red flag narcissist tells you the smudge is your eyesight. the dishwasher tells you the smudge is the wineglass. one of these is honest hardware.

so the defense holds. the dishwasher is a cabinet that judges you, which makes it the most morally upright object in the kitchen, which is why i trust its take on a red flag narcissist more than i trust my own. the cabinet has never lied. the cabinet does not have an angle. the cabinet runs on a cycle and goes home.

the gaslighting cluster, briefly, while i’m here

this is a longtail post on red flag narcissist, but it sits inside a larger investigation about how we get talked out of what we saw. if you came in via the long version of being an idiot about it — the one where the idiot in question is me, with a year of receipts — you already know the shape. someone tells you the flag is orange. you are standing next to the flag. you write down “orange” anyway. years later, you describe yourself to a therapist as “bad with colors.”

this post is not asking you to be better with colors. this post is asking you to consider letting a kitchen appliance hold the swatch.

verdict, the dishwasher judges, the flags are red

so where does this leave us. the dm is sent. the post is written. the defense is logged. the hot take stands. the red flag narcissist, in the canonical sense, was always going to be a red flag narcissist, regardless of what i told myself the color was in 2019, in 2020, in 2021, and one extremely wrong afternoon in 2022 when i told a friend over the phone that the situation was “more like a sunset than a flag.”

the dishwasher would not have said that. the dishwasher would have hummed once, stopped, and left a smudge on the wineglass that meant “you know.”

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