signs someone is a narcissistic — 1 explainer, sort of

signs that someone is the thing you suspect they are, written in a clumsy headline, is exactly how i typed it into google in 2019 when my grammar fell apart. the search worked. the result was a list. the list was correct.

i am writing this from the desk on a thursday at 10:51am. carla is upstairs at a training thing on the third floor and i have, give or take, the rest of the morning before anyone walks past my screen and asks an awkward question about why my window is not the spreadsheet.

the elevator is also somewhere in this, because the elevator is where the typo first happened in my head, between floors three and one, on a phone with one thumb, with the other hand holding a coffee i had not yet sipped. the elevator is a confessional with mirrors. you should not be allowed to draft sentences in there. and yet.

before any of this acquires gravity, the ground floor: the cluster pillar on gaslighting already covers the slow part — the rewriting of last tuesday, the loss of confidence in your own memory of a thursday. this post sits next to it as a small footnote about the moment the noun falls off the sentence, which is, i believe, a sign of its own.

signs someone is a narcissistic, the disclaimer about syntax

english, when it is not under load, prefers a complete noun phrase. you are supposed to write “signs someone is a narcissist” or “signs someone is a narcissistic person.” the adjective wants something to attach to. left dangling, it produces the sentence equivalent of a coat sleeve hanging out of a closed car door. you can drive like that. you should not.

and yet five thousand people a month type it this way. five thousand people who type the adjective and forget to bring the noun. that is not, i would argue, an accident. that is the search bar catching the typist mid-thought, before the typist’s grammar had time to put on shoes. you do not lose the noun when you are calm. you lose it when the person you are typing about has, for several months, been the noun in every sentence in your life, and your fingers, very gently, have stopped naming them.

which is, in itself, a sign. that is the post. but i am supposed to extend the post, so let me extend it.

the elevator where the syntax tripped me up

the elevator in this building has two mirrors, one on the back wall and one on the right, and they are angled in such a way that you can see, briefly, the back of your own head while also looking yourself in the eye. i do not recommend it. the elevator was not designed to be a moral instrument. somebody in 1987 just put two mirrors in a small box and decided that was hospitality.

i was on floor three holding a phone and a coffee. carla was already in the training. the spreadsheet was open on my desk one floor above me, technically waiting. and i had a question that had been forming all night, in the half-state that questions form in when you have spent the evening listening to somebody recount a tuesday in a way you remember the thursday going differently. the question wanted to be typed. the question wanted to be confirmed by a list.

so i typed it. one thumb. between floors. signs someone is a narcissistic. no noun. the autocomplete did not correct me. the autocomplete suggested it back. the search engine, which has seen this typo five thousand times a month, knew exactly where i was on the question, and offered, very quickly, a list of the kind that does not require the missing noun to be useful. (this is the seventh microwave i have killed, for what it’s worth, though that is not relevant here, except that i kill microwaves the same way i type at 1:38pm: confidently, in a hurry, with the wrong piece of cutlery.)

tom would have a tidy version, i have this one

tom, who went from the same university as me to a house and a wife and two kids and a volvo with seats that adjust in a number of ways i refuse to count, would never type this query with the noun missing. tom edits his google searches. tom told me this once, at a wedding, with a glass of wine he understood. “you should reread your search before you press enter,” tom said. tom believes in reread. tom owns the elevator he stands in. i, by contrast, rent an elevator and the elevator has two mirrors and i type in it and i press enter mid-thought.

tom would have written “signs someone in your life may be a narcissistic person.” that is twelve words. tom likes twelve. tom thinks twelve is a stable number. mine is six and a missing piece. tom’s search would return a clean list of behaviors, ranked. mine returned the same list, but with the silent footnote that the search bar already knew i was tired. we are both valid users of the same engine. mine is more honest about the time of day.

also, hot take, while we are here: books on tape are cheating. they have always been cheating. tom listens to books on tape on his commute in the volvo and tells me, on the rare phone call we still have, that he “got through” three books last month. tom did not get through any books. tom drove and a man named graham read at him. that is an audio experience. it is not a reading experience. it is the same syntax problem as my search bar — the verb wants its real object and you are letting it have the convenient one.

signs 1 to 5, the elevator-grade ones

none of these are clinical. none of these are from a manual that anyone serious would cite. these are from the elevator, the desk, the bar, and the phone calls i did not pick up. the voice on the line that never leaves a message left another non-message at 8 months and counting on a voicemail that has not been emptied since a tuesday i do not want to date precisely.

1. you replay a conversation in your head and you cannot find the part where you agreed to the thing you, somehow, agreed to. the agreement is real. the route to it is missing. the route was, as far as you can reconstruct, six small concessions strung together with the word “obviously.”

2. you draft a message on a thursday night. you delete it. you draft a different message. you delete that one too. you eventually send a message that says “ok sounds good” and then you cannot put the phone down for forty-five minutes because you keep checking whether the “ok sounds good” was received correctly, which is a thing you have never previously worried about with anyone else.

3. you describe an event to a friend and you find yourself, halfway through the description, hedging. “i think it was tuesday.” “it might have been wednesday.” “i may be remembering this wrong.” you did not used to hedge. you used to remember tuesdays. the hedging is new. the hedging is the artifact.

4. the unopened mail pile in your apartment has gained a centimeter without your involvement. the bills are not new. the growth is structural. somewhere in the pile there is a letter, return address unprinted, that the same voice on the line presumably sent. the voicemail is full. the mail pile is not. the asymmetry is part of the diagnostic.

5. your search history, on a friday at 1:14am, contains the phrase signs someone is a narcissistic, exactly that, with no noun, no follow-up click, no second search to refine. you typed it, the autocomplete confirmed it as a category, you closed the tab, and you went to bed feeling, for a moment, slightly less alone in the typo. that, also, is the post.

this is the territory the cinema covers when the cinema is honest about it. gaslight is, of course, the original — a man in a house systematically convinces a wife that the gas lamps are not dimming, until she cannot trust the room. the procedure has not changed in eighty years; only the appliances have. gone girl covers the modern version, where the rewriting is done in a diary that nobody asked for and a cable news cycle that anyone can rent. neither film inverts the grammar of its title. but both films understand the cohort that, eventually, does.

verdict, the syntax is broken, the signs work fine

so here is the finding, presented to you, the reader, the jury, the elevator that started this. the broken phrasing and the correct phrasing are not two different searches. they are two different states of the same person typing them. one is rested. one is not. the not-rested one is the one that ended up in the bar, and the bar, being a small honest mirror, returned the list the typist already knew.

if you want the longer forensic on what the rewriting of last tuesday actually does to a memory of last tuesday, the cluster pillar on the slow rewriting covers it from the systematic angle. this post is the syntactic note from the elevator. that one is the body of the report.

the elevator still has two mirrors. carla is, by the door schedule, still upstairs. the spreadsheet is, by the screen on my left, still not opened. the seventh microwave is still in the kitchen, behaving. the third yoga mat is, as of last sweep, under the couch and reportedly fine. the voice on the line has not called this morning, which is, in itself, information of a kind. the noun will keep falling off the search at 1:14am for whoever types it next, and someone will keep writing the elevator footnote about it from a desk while a training runs on the third floor. this is, i think, fine.

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