traits of a narcissist woman — 1 fairly sure investigation

traits in a woman of this particular kind are, in my experience, not different from the same traits in a man — the wardrobe shifts, the grocery list shifts, the engine underneath does not. i have, at various points, made both grocery lists. i can spot one in the produce aisle from three crates away. it is not a gift. it is a scar with a use case.

this is being written from the desk, around 11:02am on a friday, while carla sits two floors up in a procurement workshop that was scheduled for ninety minutes and will, by the natural law of these things, run one-twenty. that workshop, if you ask me — and you didn’t, but here we are — could have been a 3-line email. that’s not a digression. that’s the spine of this whole post. hold onto it.

the longer architecture of this engine lives in the pillar i wrote on gaslighting and the apartment with the dimming lights, in case you want the wider room. this one is a door. the door is a list. the list, like the workshop upstairs, did not need a meeting either, but here we are.

at the desk. friday, 8:42am. carla in the procurement workshop on the third floor, which started seven minutes late. by my arithmetic, i have until at least 10:38.

1. traits of a narcissist woman, the working list

so. traits of a narcissist woman, as i — an unqualified man with a wallet that does not close — have observed them in two close-range cases and one elevator. eight items. i had nine but one was just “rearranges your fridge without asking” and i admitted, on review, that was a separate post. the working list:

1. the warmth is performance-grade. it lands on you, briefly, in front of a witness, and lifts the moment the witness leaves the room.
2. credit migrates her way, slowly, like silt. yours, hers, hers, hers.
3. blame migrates the other way. yours, yours, yours, yours.
4. memory is editorial. last thursday is, in her telling, a draft she gets to revise.
5. the audience changes the volume. alone, normal voice. with three people, performance voice. with five, podcast voice.
6. any criticism is reframed, mid-sentence, as an attack on her person, her childhood, or her tone.
7. she is the only sane person in every room she has ever stood in. every room. forty years of rooms.
8. the version of you in her stories is a person you would not introduce yourself to.

that’s eight. defending eight items in twelve hundred words means each item gets roughly a paragraph. that is also, by some perfect symmetry, the length a meeting like the one upstairs should be. a paragraph. on email. with a subject line. every meeting could be a 3-line email. i’m going to keep saying it. it’s the central claim of this post and it has, on inspection, more to do with the list than you would think.

2. the desk where this draft started during a meeting

the draft, technically, started at the coffee cart in the lobby at 8:47am, where the barista was running on autopilot. she handed me the order before i ordered. she always does. she does not know my name. she knows the order and the mug. that is the entire relationship and it is, by some distance, the most functional one i had this week.

while i was at the coffee cart, the bank app on my phone vibrated. i did not open it. i have not opened the bank app in eleven days. there is a number in there that wants to be smaller and isn’t, and the longer i don’t open it the more it becomes a fact i can’t yet verify, which is a different kind of fact, a softer one, the kind a person can live with for another thursday. you understand the system. it was the system that produced this list.

walking back upstairs i thought about the procurement workshop. ninety minutes, eight people, three slides, one decision that was, in the end, the same decision the team would have reached in a hallway in forty seconds. every meeting could be a 3-line email. here it comes. that’s what a narcissist woman, in the cases i have observed, has in common with a corporate meeting that won’t end. both insist they are necessary. both are not. both produce the appearance of progress while costing you the morning. both end on a thursday with someone saying “let’s circle back”.

A 3-LINE EMAIL. CAN. CARRY. THE WHOLE WEIGHT.

3. items 1 to 4, with the defense embedded

item 1, performance-grade warmth. a meeting opens with the same energy: “great to see everyone, glad we could make this work, before we dive in let’s go around the room”. the warmth is the slide before the slide. it lands while the camera is on. it dims the moment the agenda begins. a narcissist woman of the type i mean has the same lead-in. warm hand on the wrist, the remembering of names, the question about your weekend that does not, on review, contain a follow-up. the warmth is a placeholder for the warmth that does not arrive. like a pre-meeting calendar invite that is the only thing the meeting will produce.

item 2, the migration of credit. in a meeting, the migration of credit is the whole sport. someone proposes the thing in slack on a wednesday. someone else, on friday in front of seven people, says “as i was thinking the other day”. the proposal acquires a new author the way a stray cat acquires a new owner. a narcissist woman of the type i mean does this in private and in slow motion. your idea, mentioned at dinner, is by sunday brunch her idea, retold in front of her sister, with a footnote about how you “weren’t sure about it at first”. email would have produced a record. the meeting did not. the dinner did not. the bank app did not. nothing in this sentence, i notice, produced a record.

item 3, the migration of blame. in a meeting, blame is the legal property of the person who wasn’t in the room. the absent are guilty. they cannot defend themselves and the meeting needs a verdict to justify its own ninety minutes. a narcissist woman of the type i mean treats absence with the same logic. you, when present, are not yet guilty — you might still vote her way. you, when out of the apartment for an hour, are the entire problem. the green chair, again, comes to mind, and i’m not going to relitigate that here, i did most of that already in the gaslighting investigation.

item 4, editorial memory. a meeting is the natural habitat of editorial memory. minutes do not exist. action items are vague. by wednesday, four people remember the meeting in four mutually exclusive ways. one of them — the loudest, usually — wins. a narcissist woman of the type i mean is, in a small two-person room, the loudest by default, and last friday, in her telling, is a draft. the photograph you took, with timestamps, is on review “out of context”. a 3-line email — composed, sent, archived, searchable — would have settled this in roughly fourteen seconds. but a 3-line email is not a meeting. and a 3-line email is not the kind of artifact a narcissist of any wardrobe likes to leave around.

4. items 5 to 8, with the meeting-could-be-email riff

item 5, audience changes the volume. a meeting changes the volume the same way. the quiet contributor on slack becomes a TED speaker the second the camera turns on. a narcissist woman of the type i mean is calibrated, in real time, to the size and importance of the audience. one-on-one she is fine, occasionally even pleasant. add a sister. add a cousin. add a stranger from work she wants to impress. the volume rises. the laugh becomes a laugh that wants to be overheard. a 3-line email cannot perform for an audience. that, in part, is why it is feared.

item 6, criticism reframed mid-sentence. meetings handle criticism the same way. you raise the budget overrun. somebody, calmly, with the patient voice of a person who has never lost an argument, says “well, what i’m hearing is that you’re worried about the team’s morale”. no. you are not. you are worried about the budget. the budget has been reframed, mid-air, into morale, and morale is the kind of issue that ends in another meeting. a narcissist woman of the type i mean does this at the speed of speech. the criticism becomes your tone. your tone becomes your childhood. your childhood becomes a topic she has, conveniently, opinions about. the original concern has, by now, no place to land. an email would have stayed on topic. that is the entire reason emails exist.

item 7, only sane person. every meeting has a self-appointed adult-in-the-room. they sigh. they say “let’s all just take a step back”. they imply, without saying, that the rest of the table is being unreasonable. a narcissist woman of the type i mean has been the only sane person in every room she has ever entered, including rooms she entered as a child, which is a feat of consistency. there is, on inspection, no evidence for this. there is also no evidence against it, because the evidence has been, item by item, edited. an email leaves a trail. that, again, is why she did not send one. that, again, is why the meeting ran long.

item 8, the version of you in her stories. at the end of a long meeting somebody, recapping, will say “and then bob said —” and bob will look up, mid-sip, because what bob said is not what bob said. a narcissist woman of the type i mean tells stories about you to people who do not know you. those stories are not lies, exactly. they are the meeting-recap of you. trimmed for time. shaped for the room. ending on her line. you, hearing them later, recognize none of yourself. the bob who said the thing does not exist. the email he did not send proves nothing. nothing is on file. that’s the design.

cinematically, the closest study object to this list is the 1981 biopic mommie dearest, the faye dunaway joan crawford performance, in which the items above arrive, frame by frame, with the warmth, the calm reframe, the editorial memory, the audience tuning, and the only-sane-person posture all on display in a single household. you can watch ninety minutes of that and return to a thursday with a refreshed eye for the engine.

5. closing pulpit, the traits are universal, the meeting was an email

so where does this leave us, on a friday morning, with the procurement workshop still running and the bank app still unopened.

the traits of a narcissist woman are, in my unqualified opinion, the same eight traits as any other narcissist of any other wardrobe. the warmth as a stage prop. the migration of credit and blame. the editorial memory. the audience-calibrated volume. the calm reframe. the only-sane-person posture. the version of you in her stories that is not you. those are the items. those don’t move.

what does move, friday after friday, is the format. and the format is the entire problem. the trait runs in private the way the meeting runs in public. ninety minutes that should have been three lines. three months that should have been one honest conversation. the corporate version is the one we have all agreed to tolerate. the personal version is the one we have not yet agreed about. that, on inspection, is what a list like this is for.

the procurement workshop just sent the kind of calendar invite that is a follow-up to itself. that’s a sign. the seventh microwave, which arrived thursday, is, by some quiet miracle, working. that’s also a sign. the bank app remains unopened. that’s a third sign. three signs, on a friday, before 10am, is, by my standards, a productive morning. the workshop will run until 11. by then i’ll be done with this and back to the inbox, where, as you know by now, i prefer the conversations to live.

the procurement workshop just produced its first slide. the slide is, by the wifi-leak preview, a graph. graphs in workshops are the meeting equivalent of a coat. i’m closing the tab.