toxic person meaning — what they don’t tell you

tom told me once that i used words wrong. tom is the kind of man who says toxic and means a person who didn’t laugh at his joke. i mean something else by it. i keep meaning to send him a list.

1:42pm, a thursday, the laptop is open on the desk. carla is in a training session on the third floor and i have a window before anyone notices. let’s go.

so the phrase toxic person meaning shows up, in my private corner of the internet, about four times a day. i’m fairly sure there is a study somewhere that explains why we all reach, at the same time, for the same word. i’m not going to find that study. i am, however, going to write the post. that’s my contribution to the literature.

toxic person meaning: a person whose presence, over time, leaves you smaller than they found you. not a person who annoys you on a wednesday. not a person who disagreed with you in the meeting. a pattern, sustained, where the cost of being near them is paid mostly by you, in tired afternoons and rehearsed apologies and small revisions of what you remember. that is the lived definition. the dictionary will be shorter and less fair.

TOXIC. IS. NOT. ABOUT. JOKES.

tom does not, structurally, agree with this. tom thinks the word is rented out by people who are bad at conflict. i do not have tom’s number anymore in any active sense — it is in the phone, but the phone is not, on tuesdays, a place i visit — but if i did, i would tell him: the word has a job, and the job is to describe a specific kind of damage. when you use it for a person who didn’t laugh at your joke, you are blunting the tool. the tool, frankly, was already small.

what the word is doing when people use it correctly

the word is doing two jobs at once. one job is descriptive: the person is, in some sustained sense, leaking. the other job is permissive: it gives the speaker permission to stop showing up. that second job is the one tom hates. tom thinks people use the word as a hall pass. tom is, on this point, half right. some people do. but the word is older than the hall pass and the word still has a use.

the use is this. there is a class of person whose ordinary daily behavior, taken across forty interactions instead of one, produces a measurable downward effect on the people they spend time with. measurable. not vibe-based. you can chart it on a napkin if you bring a pen to the bar. the chart goes down. the line of the chart is your weekend. the weekends get shorter when this person calls. the weekends get longer when this person doesn’t.

that is not a bad joke. that is a pattern. patterns are what the word was invented to describe. some patterns are a kind of slow erasure that the receiver mistakes for their own forgetfulness, and some patterns are louder than that, and some patterns are the cousin malignant narcissism, which is the same engine with a darker coat. they share parts. you can tell them apart on a long enough timeline, but the timeline is, frankly, the price of the tuition.

why tom is wrong, and why i am sending him a list anyway

tom is wrong because tom’s definition is built on a single bad weekend in 2014. tom went to a wedding, a man at the wedding made a joke about tom’s job, the man at the wedding did not laugh at tom’s counter-joke, and tom labeled that man as toxic for the rest of the trip home. tom’s wife agreed for the duration of the car ride. by monday it was a story. by thursday it was a category. tom now uses the category for any person who fails to participate in tom’s story about himself. the category, by tom’s definition, is approximately forty percent of his coworkers.

i am sending tom a list anyway because tom enjoys lists. tom organized our college dorm by adhesive label maker. tom will read a list before he reads a paragraph. the list will say, more or less, what i’m saying here, but in bullets, because tom respects bullets the way some people respect calligraphy. that’s a choice he made. it has been good for him.

the operational definition i actually use, mostly to myself

here is the working version i carry around. you can borrow it. you can amend it. you can throw it out at the door of your local establishment. i hold it loosely.

• the half-life rule. after you spend an hour with this person, how long does your mood take to recover. ten minutes? probably nothing. four hours? possibly something. the rest of the weekend? you have a candidate.
• the rehearsal rule. are you, before seeing them, scripting your sentences. are you running a small theater inside your head. theater is a sign. theater is a budget item.
• the receipt rule. are you keeping notes. screenshots. dates. timestamps. a folder named “evidence” on a phone you no longer trust. evidence is its own diagnosis. evidence implies, structurally, a court case nobody scheduled.
• the silence rule. are there topics you no longer bring up. are there opinions you have edited down to neutral on the way to dinner. the editing is data.
• the dishwasher rule. this one is private. the dishwasher is a cabinet that judges you, and so does the toxic person. the difference is that the dishwasher is, eventually, going to do its job. the toxic person, on a long enough timeline, will not.

that fifth one is a hot take i keep on a small index card and i refuse to apologize for it. the cabinet judges. it will outlive me. it will outlive tom. moving on.

related vocabulary, which i did not choose to learn

once you start reading about this you fall into a small dictionary. some of it is useful. some of it is the narcissist word, which is also a real category, and which i have, against my will, become an amateur in over narcissist definition and traits — and i’m fairly sure what i wrote there is mostly accurate, although some of it was written under the influence of an espresso machine i had not slept enough to operate.

some of the vocabulary is shared with the relationship literature. some of it is borrowed from the workplace literature. some of it — and this is the part tom likes — is used by people who only learned it last week and want a tool for explaining why their roommate is, in their telling, beyond redemption. those people will use the word for the wrong job. they will use it for someone who left dishes in the sink. that is misuse. but the word is older than the misuse. the word is still useful for the original job.

the original job. the original job is to describe a person who is not, on the available evidence, going to change inside the timeline you have to live with them.

the piece of pop-culture authority i am reaching for here

i refuse, on principle, to cite a clinical paper in a post i wrote during a training session i did not register for. but i will, on a thursday, point at the year of the movie about the toxic spouse who calmly insists nothing is wrong as a cultural reference for the pattern. that movie is, structurally, what the word is for. not the joke at the wedding. not the coworker who used the wrong meeting room. that. a person whose calm tone is the entire problem. you watch it once and the word makes sense for the rest of your life.

tom has not seen that movie. tom does not watch movies after 2003. tom and i agree on very few things and we have not agreed in five years. that is fine. tom is not, by my own definition, toxic. tom is just wrong about a word. wrong about a word is a thursday. it is not the word.

verdict — the meaning holds, the misuse is the noise

carla is not back yet. the training session is, by my count, in its second hour. i am, by my count, going to keep typing. nobody is at the door.

the list to tom is, technically, drafted in a tab i will not open later. tom will not get the list. tom will, instead, get a small wave at the next reunion, and that will be the entire transaction. that is a pattern too. it is a thursday-shaped pattern, and on tuesdays, those are the only patterns i can afford.

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