Any good negotiation starts devoid of emotion. This by any sense of the notion goes against the very make-up of a human being. There’s an end result; a goal seeking attainment. Any time you pull up a chair up to the negotiation table, any good negotiator knows that at some point the possibility of walking away from that negotiation with the desired outcome not prevalently attainable exists. You have to be right with that idea internally. Going into it under any other pretense is indicative of a loss before the first word is even uttered.
Take going to buy a car, for example. The understood rule of the buyer is to never show an overwhelming love of any car – even if said car is your dream car and you teeter with the idea of buying it whether you come to an acceptable arrangement or not. Beyond that, the buyer has to be prepared to walk away from the purchase. Furthermore, the car salesman is looking out for #1 and conversely, so is the buyer. If that salesman can get you to pay just $1 more, they hear the sound of a cash register going off and the phrase – there’s a sucker is born every day – playing over and over.
In December of 2007, I purchased my first car all on my own – no cosigner. My father attended the negotiations under the sole context that I had no clue what I was truly in for and that purchasing a car is unlike any other type of sales negotiation. I found this difficult to believe as I had spent the last 5 years of my life entrenched in sales. However, his warning proved to be no understatement by any stretch of the imagination. I found myself quietly watching my father say and do things that would be considered very out of character for him on any other given day in any other given situation.
For example, Honda offered me $2,500 as the trade-in value of my 2001 Honda Civic that had barely hit 60,000 miles and not 4 years prior purchased at $14,000. My father calmly pulled a 50 dollar bill from his pocket and laid it on the desk. His next words are forever filed under the category of – my father’s a badass. He says (and I quote), “I will give you this 50 dollar bill and kiss your ass on the 50 yard line at half-time of the next Dallas Cowboys home game, if I give you this car for $2,500 1-week from now, I will see this car on your used car lot selling for $12,000.” And my staunch Catholic father leaned back in his chair and found the sound of silence with an unrelenting stare dripping of disgust at the sheer audacity of the situation.
The salesman looked up from his computer and says, “What is it exactly that you want for your trade in?” It’s in that moment, that the salesman was on the ass end of a negotiation that was not headed in his favor and that simple statement lent for the calm and patient predator that was my unrecognizable father to pounce.
“$8,000”
That was the only thing my father said while remaining leaned back in his chair, one foot poised on the salesman’s desk. He said it almost flippantly, expecting no doubt to negotiate down to $6,000 if he had to but was unrelenting in his state of devoid emotion and inability to let the quick talking salesman dictate to him what he was going to do.
After what seemed like an eternity of fiercely moving hands over the keyboard coupled with the mutterings of what in its low tone sounded like – this guy’s crazy, I can’t do that – he leans back in his chair and rubs the top of his head. It was in that moment, that I realized we’d won this stand-off.
“Ok Mr. Williams. We’ll give you $8,000 for the trade in.”
I don’t remember what I was doing in that moment, but when I look back on it, I imagine that I my chin was dragging the floor at a loss for words coupled with an new found respect for the man I call dad.
They say that if you can take a theory and apply it to all aspects of life, it’s truly brilliant. Einstein's theory of relativity. While, the initial wording of his thoughts scribbled on a bar napkin (no doubt) may not have made sense to everyone who read it, it is undeniably applicable, valid and real. And we – all of us – now live by that theory. Sheer brilliance in its rawest of forms.
I don’t hold the illogical notion that in order to be considered brilliant you have to come up with some kind of theory, build a machine that does something that no other machine has done, understand quantum physics without ever picking up a quantum physics book or any thing else “they” dictate as truly being genius. I do, however, believe that there are brilliant people (geniuses even), while not in abundance albeit, that find their roles within the bovine herded in its common direction. It’s truly a rarity to find that person who is able to get their thoughts out, put it on paper, and give it to people resulting in common acceptance. It’s that aspect of it that truly fascinates me.
Einstein, Machiavelli, Newton, Freud, Plato, Aristotle... Steve Jobs for shits sake.
I don’t think that genius lies in what you can find in a book or how many books you’ve read for that matter. I truly think that it’s as simple as this… it’s the ability to see things as they are, in their simplest form and in the purity of a relentlessly open mind. You know perfectly why it makes sense, but you struggle to express to someone who hasn’t had the same realization – insight – that you have had. It seems blatant. It seems obvious. How is it that you just don’t see how this absolutely makes perfect sense?
My best correlation to illuminate this is the premise of the movie Good Will Hunting.
I by no stretch of the imagination classify myself as a genius. I don’t think I am all that brilliant and often times wonder how it is that I get myself through the day without donning a helmet. But what I do think and as I grow older feel – that I am not normal. I will spare the droning on and on about what really qualifies and/or quantifies normalcy and rely on the idea that it’s the best word that the English language provides to meet on an understandable common ground.
I feel often times that I misrepresent myself to the word. It’s not like I feel like I owe something to the world or that I really care ultimately how I am perceived. But I do. I think it’s getting to the self-realization that while I believe in the way I think and see things, I lack the ability to effectively express that outwardly. While it’s simple for me to say that I don’t care or it’s just that people don’t get me – it’s only recently that I have realized that that way of thinking is just a beard.
In order to survive in this world, you have to appear to act like everyone else. Even when standing in the middle of a party, you find yourself feeling like the only person there. Scanning the crowed of faces seeking out the returned stare of a person across the room who by ocularly connecting share an understanding. This happens rarely, or at least rarely in my case.
I have traits about me that mask a lot who I am. I’ll call them personality flaws; as simply put, they are flaws. I have a loud voice and generally speaking, use it to my advantage. I have been fortunate enough to have acquired a quick but often times dry wit. I am terribly independent and at times exude the idea that I don’t need to have personal relationships in life. I am content with who I am; even if that ultimately meant that I am alone in life – then so be it. And as it might be for most people, the thought of being alone in life is like a life of torture or living without purpose. For me, and more often than not as I attempt to determine who I am, am not in the least bit saddened by the thought.
I share 2 sides of personalities. First there’s the one that most everyone who knows me, knows about me; the extravert. The second, whom I find I favor the older I get; the introvert. Blah, blah – who isn’t both sides given the situation?
It’s the introvert that writes; that writes poetry. Sometimes I write things and try to read them back and have no idea what it was that I was trying to say, but that in that moment realize that I’d felt a way and try as I might, I could not make the marriage between the mind and the pen. I can count on one hand how many people have read anything that I have written in a serious mind. I like to think of myself as a thinker. I over shadow how much time I actually spend thinking by allowing my extrovert side to take the wheel. It’s like cruse control. I let her go and can just one person in a crowd; a chameleon. I am drawn to people who make me think – however inadvertent or advertent; trivial or life changing. Provoking thought within me is where I find I am happiest.
I have been asked on several occasions why it was that I stayed with the Russian (in college) for as long as I did given the underlying and at times blatant argument for the opposite. For all the he wasn’t, all that I wasn’t and all that we weren’t he still challenged me in ways outside of my natural comfort. He could do things I couldn’t. There wasn’t a longing or even a desire to be able to do any of the things he was brilliant at, but more a quiet respect. He wasn’t normal either. We weren’t normal separate and we certainly weren’t normal together. For all his short-comings, there was something bigger that found its inherent place within cancelation of one another. I wasn’t faultless in its demise either. Rather I’d even venture to say that looking back on it; I was an active factor in its failure. One of the many things that I took away from that 2-year moment in time was that I do not view self-inflicted failure as an option.
Last night, for the first time in easily 5-years, I sat across from someone who was once a stranger to me and saw my brother. He chose to walk a tough path in life stemming from self medication, self loathing and a complete disregard for his life or the lives of anyone around him. It was over the last 5 years that I had lost a best friend to a mind that just would not quiet down for even 1 minute of relief.
There was lying.
There was hatred.
There was betrayal.
In my world, I rationalized (negotiated with myself, even) that self preservation was far more important than playing the role of a forgiving sister. All of my childhood, I spent it practically raising myself. My brother had so many issues that it was impossible for my parents to chalk it up to the notion that he would one day outgrow these behaviors. The focus went to my brother almost 100% of the time. They say that children are astute and understand far more than they can verbalize. Looking back on my childhood, while at the time I had no grasp of the larger concept, I knew that no one was really watching me.
I can recall several times when I was younger, going to my parents and telling them that I felt like something was wrong. I struggled to read and often times cheated when a class in school tested our reading capabilities. I went to my mother and shared with her that the best way that I could describe what I was experiencing was that I couldn’t see. No matter how close I sat to the chalk board, I still felt like I couldn’t see. I couldn’t read and retain what it was that I was reading. While I intently loved reading, it quickly became a chore that I regularly ignored.
My mother looked at me and in a calm yet directed tone and said, “I will not have 2 children like this. You are fine. You’re just starving for attention.” It wasn’t until years later, while in college, that I was diagnosed with dyslexia. I had spent the better part of my life find work-arounds and the coping strategies that were given to me seemed extreme and how I had found to survive made sense to me even though I could not truly verbalize how it was that I was able to learn. What I did know was this – I never studied but I always attend every class. I excelled in classes like history. History never changed and therefore made memorization simple. Classes that required me to postulate theories from text that I was charged to read, caused me great grief. Find the irony in the degree I chose – Psychology; once over bachelors of arts.
All that aside, I have struggled over the last several years with the strained relationship that I have had with my brother. At its core, I simply feared 2 things – failure and the pain that came from having a brother like mine. And it’s now, when the time I have with my brother is short, that not only is he in a phenomenal place personally, but so am I. It wasn’t until last night that I really even realized that.
My brother is in the Infantry. I’ve never been prouder of one human being in my life. His military journey hasn’t been a simple one (much like his life in general) starting from having to do basic training twice to finally finding his calling to be an active-duty military man after he’d created a family; more specifically, a daughter. It was over beers last night…
Quick aside: I never thought that I would ever be in a position in this life to sit down across the table from my brother and share a couple of beers. *Such a simple action that I generally feel most people take for granted.*
It was over beers last night, that I realized that my brother and I are almost exactly alike. Not that I didn’t think that before, but before I thought we were exactly alike, except he’s crazy nuts and I’m not. He’s not crazy, not at all. He sees things in a way that others don’t. He makes no apologies for what he sees or how he chooses to express it. In his world – it just is. In this world – they called him bipolar. Being diagnosed as bipolar is almost as common as the cold these days… it’s like the word bitch. It lost the harshness of its meaning by its overuse and general societal acceptance.
Now would I call my brother bipolar? No, I don’t think that that one word sums him up. He’s 100% medication free – on all levels. This does not stunt his existence by any means. He’s merely found his survival techniques somewhere within the roads he’s walked and the things he’s experienced. And I respected that in a way that felt so deep, that I questioned how much of the conversation I was hearing and how much of it I was internalizing. Either way, there was a provocation of thought and a thought that made perfect sense to me.
He confirmed for me, for the first time ever, that he had animosity towards me because while I was doing a lot of the same things that he was doing, often times doing those things right along side of him, I was able to function in the normal world; and he was not. I got a degree. I got a job. I moved out and moved on. He was stuck in his own personally created hell where he felt like he was standing still in front of a green-scene of quickly moving scenes of his life highlighting his failures.
I knew he had hatred and animosity towards me. What I didn’t know was what the root of those consuming feelings that he found every opportunity to outwardly express to me right when I was at my lowest points. It wasn’t until he found his own personal middle ground that he truly understood why it was that I could move from world to world seamlessly. It is my honest belief, that because my brother required so much attention as a child, my parents refusal to deal with any issues that I had growing up and my desire and keen ability to fly under my brothers radar gave me the ability to strategize, plot and execute without being detected. My brother simply called me a functioning addict. And that may have been true.
I don’t live the life of an addict today. I don’t think I would ever even classify myself as an addict. I think I have addictive habits and traits, but I have always been able to walk away from anything when I was ready to walk away. I think I did those things during that time in an attempt to cope with a world that I most likely secretly hated with a brother who was once a best friend turned poison. Even reliving that statement saddens me in a way that I cannot describe. I wouldn’t take that time back and I certainly wouldn’t have done it any differently, but on the same note I wouldn’t go back and live it again. It’s simply a memory of a survival story – two-fold.
So there we were. Two adults who in a lot of ways need to say nothing to just understand one another. It has always been that way between my brother and I – even when our relationship was viciously deteriorating; ripping at the seams. Having that moment with my brother last night is probably one of the best moments that I have ever shared with him – and believe me, we have some good stories. All the animosity, hatred, fear of failure and pain seemed so distant that it was hard to imagine that it ever felt like that before. I felt like I finally had my brother back; my best friend. And we talked for hours about all kinds of things that in all the time we have known each other, had never found those common grounds before. It was last night that made me realize that my brother and I are almost exactly alike. That realization wasn’t even remotely scary to me but slightly comforting. Comforting to know that while I struggle to find where it is in this world that I fit and tangling with the notion that maybe I don’t fit… there was my brother, who just knew – without words – what that felt like.
I told my brother the story of a date I went on several months back with a guy who I can only describe as simple. This guy shot down every possible avenue that I extended to have some kind of thought provoking conversation while simultaneously offering nothing in return. There came a point in time during the dinner where I was quiet and he was quiet. It was in my silence that I realized that I wasn’t the normal one sitting at the table – a feeling that I had never really felt before. Up until that point, I thought I was normal and figured it was my clumsiness with words that prevented people from understanding me or getting to know me on a deeper level. But as I sat their quietly, I envisioned how he would describe me to his friends.
“She’s pretty, but I’ll tell you what though, she’s a bit eccentric.”
Eccentric was how I felt but was probably never a word this guy would have used. To reiterate, he was a very simple guy. I’m sure he would have said something like she’s odd or a little out there or something to that extent. That’s not to say that I thought he was unintelligent that I was smarter than he was or anything like that – we were just 2 very different people struggling to find a connection within the conversation. It never came.
I was telling my brother the part where I had had the very real feeling that I was not the normal one at the table and my brother responded with, “you’ve never been the normal one at the table, you just found an extraverted personality to hide behind – have you been doing some soul searching lately?” And I had. He’d pinned me and I was reaching my arm out to tap the matt to get out from underneath this self-realization and go back to the beer that we were having… but he wouldn’t let it go.
Over the last 8 months or so, I have been met with what I would call personal lows followed by what I can only refer to now not as a all time high, but more of a time of self-realization, understanding and coming to terms with things that I had chosen not to think about for an infinite amount of reasons. I am the happiest I have ever been. A statement I make without even flinching or having a hint of doubt in the back of my mind. It just is – and I am beyond content with that feeling. The kicker is that my situation currently isn’t where I expected to be when I felt a sense of total personal happiness. Kinda funny how it worked out that way. It just makes me laugh and know that no matter what happens in life, I can always feel like this – if I choose to.
I feel that since I have found this personal happiness, it has really eliminated the need for me to be extraverted all the time. I find myself not cutting people off to talk over them. I find myself doing a lot more listening. I don’t have to be the life of the party. I don’t have to make jokes. I don’t want to verbally spar with you outside of anything designed to be fun. I don’t want to pick fights with people and if a fight rears its head in my world, I am more apt to back down and walk away. I don’t want to intentionally make other people fee stupid. I don’t want people to meet me and deduce instantly that I am negative or that I am gruff and rough around the edges. I don’t want them to see anything other than that I am a thinker. It has been exceptionally hard for me to break outside of what I had always thought I’d found comfort in. Oddly enough, the better I get at being who I really think I am, the more I find comfort in that.
My brother leaves to go overseas soon. He left for San Antonio this morning to rejoin his unit in preparations to make their first tour. It was last night that he told me where he was really going to be stationed and what he was really going to be doing while he was there. It was not the plush job he’d made us all think he was going to have far out of the sight of danger and destruction. He hasn’t told everyone and has no intentions of telling some people just under the pretense that it’s just better that they don’t know what he is doing so that they can make it through back here at home. I won’t share where he’s going either, but I will tell you that he said that 1 out of every 2 convoy units don’t make it back from their tour.
It made the thought that this might actually be the last time I see my brother hit a little harder. I had to excuse myself to the bathroom to shed a few tears before I pulled myself together. Here it’s been 5+ years of not having a relationship with you only to find that the best moment I ever spent with my brother might very realistically be the last. I was stricken with sadness, but not for the reasons you’d think. This was the first time that I felt like he was my big brother. He had made decisions in life and they were well thought out and executed. He spoke maturely and calmly. He didn’t pound his beers – rather he sipped them over the hours we spent there. He was a man, a brother, a father. And that was something I never thought I would see in my lifetime. And I know that if he dies over there, that that is exactly where he belonged. That he died a respected man doing what he was born to do and did it well. I was saddened because I knew that if he died over there, I wouldn’t be sad. Which sounds kind of shitty, but when I said it to him his response was, “I know exactly what you mean” – and then we nodded and shared a silence.
I suppose after spending that time with my brother, I came to the conclusion that one thing after another – at least applicable to my life and his – has been a negotiation. Knowingly or unknowingly has seemingly proven irrelevant. It wasn’t until recently that I removed the emotion from my self-negotiations. Breaking it down to the facts, dissecting it, finding the rusty parts and sandpapering them and then putting it all back together. The metaphoric clock, so-to-say has been keeping perfect time ever since.
I have found what I believe to be true. I have begun to find the person inside that makes sense. The person who doesn’t hide behind a shroud for fear that someone might just figure me out. I am my father sitting in that salesman’s office leaning back in my chair with my foot poised on the world.
I finally feel like me.
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