toxic person definition — what they don’t tell you

there is a working definition i have built over four years and seventeen ignored phone calls. if you call someone every other wednesday and they never answer, you may already qualify. i did not invent this rule. it invented itself.

it is 11:03am on a wednesday. i am drafting from the desk. carla is in a budget meeting on the third and i floor have a window of about forty-five minutes.

so we are going to define toxic person definition the same way an elevator defines its destination — by stopping where it stops and pretending it always meant to. tom used to call this method “lazy”. tom called many things lazy. tom is in the file labeled past and the file labeled past does not, on wednesdays, get opened.

toxic person definition: a person whose pattern of contact, sustained over months, leaves the people in the contact zone smaller, edited, or rehearsed. the receiving person starts to script. the receiving person starts to dodge. the receiving person starts to time their own elevator rides around the schedule of someone else. that is the operating definition. it lives in no textbook i could cite by title. it survived four years of testing.

DEFINITION. IS. A. PATTERN. NOT. AN. EVENT.

i had to write that for myself first because i kept misfiling. one bad evening was, for years, enough to put a person in the wrong column. that is a category error. an evening is an evening. the definition needs forty evenings. forty is the number i settled on after some informal counting. the counting is me, looking at things.

where this working definition came from, more or less

the elevator. that is where the definition started. there is, in this building, an elevator i ride twice a day, and there is a man on a different floor whose schedule i memorized so i would not ride the elevator with him. i did not, at the time, label him with the word. i labeled him with a small dread that i scheduled around. the schedule got tighter over months. by month four, the schedule was the diagnosis.

that is the clinical part of this post and it is the only clinical part. the rest is bar talk. but the bar talk is, frankly, where the working definitions live. the textbooks talk about grandiose markers and pattern arrays. the bar says: you took the stairs for a year. that was the data. the bar is, on most evenings, more accurate than the manual. the bar is also closing earlier than it used to, which is a separate complaint.

i’m not going to pretend i wrote this in a single sitting. the working definition was assembled across four years, possibly five if you count the year i wasted asking the wrong questions of the wrong people. the questions were things like am i imagining this, which is the wrong question, because the asking of it is the answer.

the elevator test, in plain bar english

the elevator test is short. you stand in the elevator. the doors are about to close. a person enters. ask yourself, in the four seconds before the doors decide, whether your body just got smaller.

that is the test. that is all of the test. it requires no formal letters after a name. it does not require a folder of receipts. it requires four seconds and the willingness to be honest about the four seconds.

if your body got smaller — meaning the shoulders rose, the breath shortened, the small voice in the head started writing a new opening line — you have a candidate. it does not, on a single elevator ride, prove anything. it does, on the third such ride in a row, suggest that the pattern is doing what patterns do. patterns scale. patterns grow teeth. patterns get a phone number that calls every other wednesday.

that is the hot take and it is doing two jobs at once. the first job is to show what a flat rule looks like. the second job is, frankly, to put a flag in the ground, because i am tired of long arguments about percentage points. flat rules are restful. you can apply them in an elevator without thinking.

three other tests that survived

over the four years i kept other tests. some of them did not survive. the test i called the email reply test did not survive because everyone is bad at email and i am bad at email and the test was just measuring email. the test i called the laughter test did not survive because tom does, in fact, laugh at his own jokes, which made the test useless on tom and useful on nobody else.

three tests survived. i offer them with no warranty.

• the dodged-call test. if the phone rings and you do not, in any meaningful sense, want to pick up — and the not-wanting is consistent over months — the not-wanting is data. the call from tom on the screen, week after week, declined without thought, is a small clinical study you ran on yourself. you are the data. you are also the methodology. i admit the methodology is loose.
• the rehearsal test. you script the conversation in your head before the conversation. the script gets longer each week. the script eventually has stage directions. when the script has stage directions, the relationship has a venue, and the venue has tickets, and the tickets are expensive.
• the smaller-room test. after you leave the room, do you feel as if the room you walked into is smaller now. not the literal room. the room of you. that is the test. it sounds like nonsense. it works.

the three tests, applied in any order, will get you to roughly the same answer about roughly the same person. consistency across the three is, i’d argue, what the word is for. you are not diagnosing them. you are diagnosing the pattern between you. the pattern is what the word names.

what the working definition is not

this matters. the working definition is not a permanent label on a person. it is a label on a pattern between you. people are capable of being gradually told that their own memory is wrong and they are also capable of changing, occasionally, on a wednesday, after their own elevator test gets honest. the word names the pattern. the word does not name the soul of the person. that distinction matters and i, on most wednesdays, forget it.

a related distinction worth keeping is between toxic and the older clinical word narcissist definition traits and and i’m fairly sure i mostly got that one right. narcissist is a stricter category. you need more boxes ticked. toxic is broader. the elevator test will pick up both. the manual test will only pick up one.

and there is the cousin term malignant narcissism, which is the same engine wearing a darker coat — i mention it because some readers, on some wednesdays, will need the harder word for the harder pattern. some readers will not. you know which you are. you have known for a year.

tom on the phone is, by the way, the perfect case study and i refuse to elaborate. the phone rings. i let it ring. the voicemail fills. the voicemail does not get listened to. that is the fifth tom phone call this month. mc9 in some private system i don’t have. moving on.

related: the moron test, kept brief

i’m not going to relitigate the word moron here, but i’ll note, for the record, that being a moron and being toxic are different categories. moron is a self-applied category most days. toxic is something the elevator decides about other people. you can be a moron and not be toxic. i, for example, qualify on the first count and (i hope) not the second. that is the small comfort. it is the only comfort the post offers. take it.

verdict — the definition is operational, the elevator is the test