toxic people — 1 thorough investigation

people, plural, is the inventory i did not want to make. i made it anyway. i scribbled it across a takeout menu around one a.m. and then i could not throw out the takeout menu. it lives in my drawer now.

i am, since one a.m., trying to figure out what the word toxic is doing for any of us. it is small. it is everywhere. it is, on the menu where i wrote it, sitting between “noodles” and the address of a place that closed in 2022. that, on its own, ought to disqualify it from serious use.

but here we are. it is 10:14am on a wednesday. i am at my desk, in a building i would prefer not to name, with the takeout menu folded twice and tucked under the keyboard. carla is upstairs at the budget pre-read. i have, charitably, ninety minutes before someone wonders what i am doing in this document.

writing this from the desk. carla is on the third floor at the budget pre-read. the rest of the morning is, generously, mine.

the term is useful when it makes you stop, count, and decide. it is lazy when it does the deciding for you and you find yourself calling somebody toxic on a tuesday because they ordered the wrong wine. those are not the same use. one is a tool. one is a hammer being used on bread.

toxic people, the working version

here is the version i would put on a fridge, if my fridge had room, which it does not because the seventh microwave is on the counter where the magnets ought to live and i have given up on the magnets entirely. the working version of toxic people: a category for the recurring pattern of being around someone and ending up less yourself than you were when you started.

the keyword in that sentence is pattern. one tuesday is a tuesday. one bad dinner is a bad dinner. a man can be cranky in a doctor’s office and not be a category. a friend can cancel three times and still be a friend. the working version of toxic kicks in only when the same effect keeps happening, with the same person, in different rooms, over a credible amount of time.

the broader umbrella overlaps with what the related earlier post on gaslighting in a relationship that ended in 2019 tries to draw, with calmer voices and a folder named “evidence”. that post is about one specific tactic. this one is about the umbrella.

generic, however, is not the same as vague. there is a temptation, when you have a generic label, to apply it to everyone who has ever inconvenienced you. i’d suggest, gently, that this is the mistake. the toxic-people category is not a synonym for “people i did not enjoy this week”. if it were, my own list would include the man at the supermarket counter who, on monday, sighed at me when i forgot the bag. that man is not toxic. that man had a long shift. these are different categories.

tom would have a structured opinion, i have notifications

i ran this, mentally, past tom. i did not call tom. i never call tom. i imagined calling tom. tom owns a house. tom drives a volvo whose seats are configurable in roughly fourteen postures. tom has a pension that, when described, made me feel like a man who had been doing his finances inside the seventh microwave. tom has structured opinions about everything, including credit cards as a personality trait, a take he delivered, once, at a wedding, near the bread basket.

tom’s structured opinion would, i suspect, be that the word toxic is overused. that we, as a culture, have eroded a useful term by applying it to the dishwasher loading habits of our roommates. tom would be partially right. tom is partially right about most things, which is, frankly, why he is exhausting on a phone call and why i let his calls go.

i, meanwhile, have notifications. i have the notification, the one that arrives at the wrong time, on the wrong device, with the predictable cruelty of an algorithm that has been studying me for years and has decided i need to know, at 11:47pm, that someone i used to share a couch with has, in fact, posted a story about a brunch. tom does not have notifications turned on. tom has a wife and a calendar and a system and the rest of his evening.

the notification i ignored that proved a point

the notification, last wednesday, at 11:47pm, was from an app i had forgotten i had installed. it told me, with cheerful precision, that a person — let’s say “a person from the takeout-menu list” — had updated their status. i did not click. i lay there, in the apartment, on the side of the bed nearest the wall.

i considered whether the notification itself was toxic. and here is the answer: no. the notification is a notification. the system is a system. the toxicity, if any, was local. the toxicity was the way i handled it — by lying still, by checking three times whether i had opened the app, by composing, in my head, a reply i did not send to a question that had not been asked. the design is annoying. my response to the design is the part that costs me sleep.

this is a small example. it is also the entire pattern. the person who posted is not toxic. the app is not toxic. my response, on a wednesday at 11:47pm, was a small toxic event in a single apartment.

the kinds of toxic people, briefly, with footnotes

i resisted, for several weeks, doing this part. lists invite criticism. but here are the categories i scribbled on the menu, with the understanding that each one is its own investigation and several of them already have one.

• the memory-rewriter. the patient correcter. the calm denier. the rehearsed-tone specialist. the long-form lives in the longer treatment of what toxic means inside a romantic context.
• the chronic fabricator. the person whose stories, on tuesdays, do not match their stories on thursdays. they will tell you they were in two cities at once, with a smile and a glass of wine. the diagnostic for that exact word — the plain old standalone investigation of the term for a person who lies habitually — is its own thing. the word “liar” is, frankly, simpler than “toxic”, and sometimes simpler is what the room needs.
• the room-shrinker. the one who arrives and the room gets smaller. you laugh less. you check your phone more. you find yourself rehearsing what you are about to say before you say it, even though you are talking about a sandwich.
• the score-keeper. the one who brings up, in a fight about the dishwasher, something you said in 2017. that is a database. databases are not built by accident.
• the unsolicited diagnostician. the one who tells you, often, what you “really” mean. they are translating you, in real time, to a version they prefer. the term lives, closer up, in the close-up definition of what a single toxic person looks like in the wild.

five categories. five different rooms. one umbrella term. the umbrella, you’ll notice, is generic. that is fine. it keeps the rain off; it is not designed to identify the storm.

and to be clear: the second category — the chronic fabricator — has a sharper specific name. the word liar does heavier lifting than the word toxic. for the standalone term i wrote separately, the post on the noun liar in plain english sits at the next door over. that liar post is the version you reach for when “toxic” has stopped doing the job.

HT28, for what it is worth, says the taxman sends letters in serif font. i think about that line when i think about the difference between a working label and a clinical one. clinical labels come with serif. working labels come with the typeface a man used at one a.m. on the back of a takeout menu. both are real. only one will, technically, send you a letter.

GENERIC. IS. NOT. WRONG.

verdict — the toxic people are people, the toxicity is local

carla just walked the corridor. cursor blinked. i looked appropriately occupied. that’s two-for-two on plausible deniability before lunch.

↑