Thank you for your message!
I'll try to answer as best as I can. My close friends and family sometimes mock me gently for my attitude, but overall, I think they're happy with it. Even if they're trying to help me learn about how to take breaks. I'm listening, but the translation process is quite long.
Being vulnerable with them is hard. But I'm trying my best. I think I've been doing it increasingly the last year but that's never easy. It happens, now, though!
I really don't think I hold them to these standards. And that's 'it because they wouldn't be worthy of these standard, making me a superior being. It's just that.. they have their own sets of standards. Mine are about, err.. morals. Theirs can be about creativity, balance or anything else and it would be equally beautiful. Well, if they were terrible human beings, I don't think we would be friends at all.
As for your last question, yes, I do.. I think. I hold them to what I liked in them. Even if I admit people may change, even radically. I.. yeah, there's something in them that I loved. And that thing may very well change in it's expression, but if at some point I feel it's totally gone, I may have a hard time remaining friends with them. But I suppose most people react like that?
Regarding your thoughts, well.. That's a tough one.
But a really interesting one as well.
I'm not really sure.. I suppose that may be my way to avoid being scared of death while I live ? Imagining the scene and just being like "Well, it's okay if it ends now, I explored the way I've chosen in life as much as I could". There may be something like that. I imagine it's more.. serene?
I'm not sure - but maybe I don't see - what parts of life I would miss right now. Because I don't think I'm.. hmm.. forbidding myself any specific path I would like to tread with these standards. Drugs? Certain types of illegal acts? Starting over in another country? Why not. Things I don't want to do, though, like trying to dominate people, I could say I'm preventing myself from that, but really, that's.. contradicting all I want so strongly I'm not even sure who "I" is in this case.
Il not 100% sure about my answer, but your question about death was a very interesting one. And I really appreciate the way you framed it. Thank you!
I like this conversation very much too. And I like the way you describe your will to volunteer and your conception of the steps ahead.
As for religions, I'm not certain. I can really like and admire people who live and love deeply something in the religious faith. Alone or with others. But communities.. I'm not saying social control is bad in itself but this type of social control is rather frightening to me.
And changing... What a topic! Did you ever try to measure the time it takes you to change on a specific aspect? It's a very strange yet reassuring experience. I used to do this a lot, a bit less nowadays, but for example, I'd write :
"learn to handle praise to be as kind as possible with others, understanding it as" somehow I kinda like something in you" and accept the kindness but be unsettled by the praise itself, or, better, make yourself truly incapable of understanding it as a praise"
in a notebook, because it was a very often present in my thoughts and then, after writing, forget about it. Let things unfold organically without giving it much thoughts. An indeterminate time later, I'd be praised for school performance, for example, and.. somehow, in a way I couldn't fully understand, I both felt I understood the praise and I didn't really know what to make of it, all the sudden.
Then, a few weeks later, after processing the event, grab my notebook and write : "8 months".
It's quite interesting, and gives a little sense of : "Hmmm.. this may take quite a time, but let's see when/how/by which ways I'll try to get there.. or at least somewhere close!"