May Day! Mayday!

Day 2: I am crazy, and/but my intentions are good.

These are both things that people continually tell me about myself, and that I continually believe, but depending on who says it and how, both can mean a variety of different things to me. The result has been a jumbled inner narrative that I can’t quite get sorted.

Kind of like having a holiday that hardly anyone celebrates (or even remembers anymore) mean the same thing as a distress call. Do you want flowers and dancing? Or an ambulance?

This is (sort of) going somewhere. Yesterday I mentioned the Do It Scared podcast by Ruth Soukup, and that episode1 [someday maybe I will link it here] outlines a four-step strategy that I had both heard before/instantly dismissed and considered in a new way.
Step 1 is Dream Big-everything that you would do if you had infinite resources.
Step 2 is Narrow that list to what you really want to do.

Here’s another fear of mine: admitting how I’ve screwed up. Not THAT I’ve screwed up, but HOW I have. I believe in and try to accept the grace I am offered, wherever it comes from, but I hate admitting that I didn’t think through the implications, i.e. forsee the mistake I was going to make, before I made it.

I realized it was actually IMPOSSIBLE (not just a fun thought experiment) to do Step 1 and Step 2 at the same time

I cannot dream as big as I want to dream, while simultaneously narrowing by what is possible/likely/really interesting to me. Instead I try to do it all and let things weed themselves out.

Just like my borderline perfectionist tendency to anticipate my own mistakes, this is shooting myself in the foot, at the very least.

So is believing that I am either crazy, well intentioned, or both, unless I know exactly what those things mean to me.

So is answering my earlier hypothetical question—would you prefer flowers and dancing or an ambulance?—with “both?” almost certainly what I would say on the spot, when, if I really thought about it, I’d probably infinitely prefer that no ambulances were involved in my May Day celebrations.