Promise is easy and hard

Making promises is easy. Keeping them is hard.

This year, I’ve made countless promises to my friends and myself. Like New Year’s resolutions, most of them haven’t lasted. I guess I’m lucky my friends haven’t gotten annoyed and called me a liar.

These aren’t even big promises. They’re tiny ones. I often tell myself I’ll go to bed before midnight. But when midnight comes, I’m still playing games or reading books. There’s always an excuse.

Sometimes I wonder if that makes me a liar—to others, but mostly to myself. Being someone who always means what he says is harder than I thought.

Maybe it’s just human nature. Maybe staying up a little late isn’t a big deal. But what bothers me isn’t really the bedtime. It’s that every broken promise makes it a little harder to believe myself the next time. This indeed hurt my identity and ego. I want to think of myself as someone who keeps his word, even when nobody else is watching.

That's it.