toxic person — 1 investigation

the singular, toxic person, is what we say when we have only enough emotional bandwidth to think about one of them at a time. i have one slot in my head for this. the slot is currently occupied. it has been for a while.

writing this from the desk. carla is on the third floor, q3 review, second of three sessions, the one nobody volunteered for. that gives me the rest of the morning, maybe a little more if the slides go long, which they will, because slides always go long when carla is the one clicking through them.

i was going to file a longer thing. i’m filing a shorter thing. two words. that’s the whole investigation. the rest is footnotes.

toxic person, the working version

i have read longer takes on this. some of them are mine. the longest is the one on gaslighting as a household appliance, which i still consider my finest work, and also the one i return to when i need to remember why i started writing any of this down in the first place.

but the working version of a toxic person is shorter than the longest version, and the working version is what you actually need at 10:51am on a tuesday with milk in your hand.

here it is. a toxic person is the one human whose name appears in your head before the coffee does. they are the first thought. they are the reason you check your phone before you check the time. they are the reason you have a phone-checking rhythm at all. that’s the whole definition. i wrote it down. i am writing it down again now in case i forget.

there is a longer take, a more clinical one, in the two-word definition i tried to expand for an entire afternoon last march. it did not get shorter. it got longer. that’s how these things go. the shorter the term, the longer the explanation. nobody knows why. i am fairly sure there is a study somewhere, possibly in a magazine they keep at the doctor’s office.

the supermarket where the draft happened with milk in hand

i was at the supermarket. one item. milk. i had written it on my hand. hand-milk. the system, as systems go, was foolproof, in the sense that the fool was the system.

i was standing in the dairy aisle. the milk was in front of me. my hand was holding it. then the notification came in. a small, familiar buzz. i did not look. i knew who it was. that’s the trick of the toxic person, you know who it is before you look. the slot is full. the slot tells you.

i held the milk for a long time. i would estimate three minutes. some woman with a basket asked me if i was okay. i said yes. she said okay. she did not believe me. i did not blame her. i did not believe me either.

i thought, in that aisle, with the milk going slightly less cold against my palm, that this was an ironic situation. i was holding milk and ignoring a phone. milk has a shorter expiration than the toxic person in the slot. the milk would be gone in a week. the slot occupant would be there next month, next year, next milk.

ONE SLOT. ONE OCCUPANT. NO WAITING LIST.

i bought the milk. i also bought a frying pan i did not need. and the third yoga mat is still under the couch, but i bought a fourth one anyway, because the supermarket sells yoga mats now, which is, i would argue, the supermarket’s problem, not mine.

the notification was still there when i got home. it was still there an hour later. it is still there now, technically. it remains, a small red dot on a small green icon, on a phone that is, this morning, twenty-three percent.

the dodged-call diagnostic, briefly applied

here is a diagnostic i use, which i made up, which i stand by. you have a toxic person if there is a phone call you dodge in a way that has a name.

my dodge has a name. it is called the elevator dodge, because i first did it in the elevator. the call came in. i was in the elevator. i pressed nothing. i let it ring. i looked up at the floor numbers like the floor numbers had asked me a question. when the elevator opened, the call had stopped. the voicemail was full eight months ago. the voicemail will be full eight months from now. it is the most reliable thing in my life, that voicemail.

i have done the elevator dodge in: the elevator, the supermarket (see above), the kitchen (mine, which is awkward, because i was the only one there), the bar (mike’s bar, not mine, mike has a system for taxes and he watched me do this and said nothing, because mike says nothing when something is being avoided, mike has an instinct), and once, recently, while in the act of paying a credit card bill, which felt like an elaborate joke being staged at my expense.

five locations. one dodge. one toxic person occupying the slot.

i have tried the diagnostic on a friend. the friend laughed. then the friend stopped laughing. then the friend said, very quietly, “i do mine in the parking garage.” that’s how the diagnostic works. you ask. people answer. the answers are specific. the answers always include a place. that’s how i know it’s real.

this is the same machinery, slightly differently lit, that i wrote about in the long piece on gaslighting as a household appliance — the one that explains how a single person can rearrange your relationship with your own kitchen. the toxic person, in this telling, is the gaslighter’s smaller cousin. less ambitious. just as resident. occupies the same square footage.

the kinds of toxic person, briefly listed

there are, by my own informal count, conducted from a desk over a single morning, four kinds.

kind one. the ex. they are not in your life. they are in your head. they have, in fact, moved on, possibly with a guy who owns a volvo with seats that adjust in too many ways. you are not over it. you say you are over it. you are not over it. the volvo is the giveaway.

kind two. the family. they raised you. they will outlast you. they will leave passive-aggressive messages about milk on a sunday and you will never recover. there is no fixing this. there is only a long quiet acceptance that mom will, in fact, always know.

kind three. the work one. they are in another meeting. they are always in another meeting. they will, when present, ruin a wednesday in fourteen seconds. carla is, as i note here, NOT this. carla is a coworker. carla is in q3. the toxic work one is somebody else’s name, which i will not type, because typing is a contract.

kind four. the friend who became a project. they are the one you met at twenty-two. they are still calling. they have not changed. they have, if anything, intensified. you owe them nothing and you call back anyway and that is the slot operating in the open, in broad daylight, in front of god and the unopened mail pile on the kitchen counter.

i am, depending on the week, dealing with one of these. i am not telling you which.

verdict — the toxic person is a person, the toxicity is local

here is the verdict, such as it is, written with the rest of the morning ticking down and carla’s q3 not yet over.

a toxic person is not, in most cases, an evil person. they are a person whose particular alchemy with you, specifically, produces a result you cannot metabolize. somebody else takes them in stride. your sister thinks they are charming. your mom would like them. that’s the part that makes you feel insane. the toxicity is not in them. it is in the meeting of you and them. it is local weather.

which is why i recommend, at minimum, the diagnostic. find your dodge. find its location. give it a name. the elevator dodge. the parking garage dodge. the dairy aisle dodge. once it has a name, you can decide if you want to keep doing it. usually the answer is yes. that is also fine. naming is not fixing. naming is honesty. honesty is, in this household, a small and rare thing, and i am keeping it on the same shelf as the good knife i never use.

you can also watch gaslight (1944) and tell me which of the two people in that house is the toxic one. it is, technically, both. that is not a spoiler. the movie is eighty years old. you’ve had your chance. ingrid bergman won an oscar. the husband won the right to be the noun for the rest of recorded time. fair trade.

and if you want a faster, louder version of the same dynamic with drums, watch whiplash (2014), where the toxic person is a music teacher and the slot occupant is a drum kit. same machinery. different rhythm section.

beach vacations are punishment with sand, by the way, and i bring this up because i have been told, repeatedly, by the slot occupant, that the way to stop thinking about the slot occupant is to take a beach vacation. it is not. nothing about a beach helps. you take the slot to the beach. the slot tans.

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