I dislike writing my work logs after having smoked weed, but I will make an exception this night, because there is something I have discovered in the way of self-promises which is interesting when it crosses states of mind.
In my soberness, I tell myself: "After you go out to smoke, sit down in the kitchen and write in your journal", but I would come back from the balcony and go directly to bed. Then I'd space out into wonderful bodily sensations until I fell asleep.
It is 10:30, I can surely continue writing, though my eyelids area feeling heavy. Grandma is coughing, but her cough is much better than before. A moment of self-consciousness of the wrong kind, I was set to speak about self-promises, and here I am rambling about my reasons for being "lazy", but that is the whole point: you attend what the self needs at the moment, I know that if I grab my notebook, I will just be distracted by my own calligraphy instead of being able to follow my train of thought.
And now I feel a great need to get into my body and relax it for sleeping, and here enters a self-promise in practical matters: I promise myself I will continue writing this work log tomorrow in the morning.
Here I am writing in the morning, which I would surely haven't done if I hadn't promised it to myself. There is a tinge of doubt "is this really necessary?", but it is overruled by the importance of a self-promise.
There is no promise more important to fulfill than those promises that you make to yourself. The reason for this is to trust your own reliability. If you often break your promises to yourself, every time you commit to doing something you will hear a voice in the back of your head expressing self-doubt, or worse even, you will believe yourself and when the time comes, you will do nothing.
When you first try to consciously fulfill your self-promises, you will find that on some occasions you will break them. This does not demonstrate a lack of character, but a lack of self-knowledge, there is no reason to recriminate against the self. One should simply notice that the promise was broken and why.
After a while of this, you will know better than to promise yourself something that is unlikely to be fulfilled, but then what is promised to yourself is as good as done.
An added challenge to this is when promises must cross states of mind, which was the original intention of writing this work log: when I smoke, I promise myself things that my sober self will do, and when I'm sober, I promise myself things that my smoked self will do, but then the person who promised seems to be different from the person fulfilling the promise, and the promise is broken without a second thought.
If one applies the same diligence cross-state, the division between states is reduced, there is an agreement within these fragments of the self. Then something interesting happens: one notices there is a persistent self that crosses states of mind, the fragments belong to a larger whole, and that by fulfilling the promises between the fragments one becomes more identified with the whole rather than with the fragments, making your spirit encompass the totality of being instead of confining it to the fragment.