You’re Not Failing. You’re Getting Closer.
Every attempt counts
In 2012, Andy Murray went against tennis legend Roger Federer in the Wimbledon final. The match lasted three and a half hours. Murray lost. When a reporter asked him afterward how he felt about the match, his answer has stayed with me ever since.
“I’m getting closer.”
Not defeated. Not broken. Not questioning whether he should keep playing tennis. Just plainly acknowledging that the gap between where he was and where he wanted to be was narrowing. He had just lost one of the most watched matches in the world, on the grandest stage in his sport, and his honest response was that it counted as progress.
The Math I Was Doing Wrong
I lost count of the number of times I tried to quit drinking. The number is genuinely embarrassing to think about, not because the attempts happened, but because of what I told myself each time one of them ended. Every time I made it a few days and then found myself back at the refrigerator or standing at a bar, I filed it under the same category: failure. Clean and total. Another entry in a ledger that seemed to have only one column.
The pattern was relentless. I’d decide I was done, feel good about it for a day or two, maybe three, and then find some version of the same Saturday night or the same stressful Tuesday that I’d been navigating with a drink for twenty years. And the drink would win. Again. And I would wake up the next morning and add another loss to the record, more certain than ever that the problem was me.
What I was completely missing was the other column.
What Losing Can Actually Mean
When Andy Murray said he was getting closer, he wasn’t being delusional or performing grace for the cameras. He was reading the data accurately. He had played better tennis than he had in previous finals. He had pushed the best player in the world for three and a half hours. His serve had improved. His endurance had improved. The loss was real, but it wasn’t only a loss. It contained evidence that the work was accumulating, even though the scoreboard didn’t show it.
Every serious attempt I made to stop drinking contained evidence of success. I just didn’t know how to read it.
Every serious attempt I made to stop drinking contained that same kind of evidence. I just didn’t know how to read it. Each time I made it four days before breaking, I had gone further than I’d gone the time before. Each time I made it through a Monday and a Tuesday and fell apart on a Wednesday, I had learned something specific about where my defenses were weakest. Each time I felt the pull and paused, even briefly, before giving in, I had practiced something. The neural pathway that led to the drink was getting the tiniest bit of competition from a different route.
None of that showed up in how I felt on Thursday morning. But it was real.
The Shame Was Louder Than the Data
The problem with framing every attempt as a failure is that shame is extraordinarily loud. It drowns out the quieter, more accurate signal underneath — the one that says you are not the same person you were the last time you tried. Shame collapses time. It takes twenty attempts and flattens them into a single verdict about your character, rather than a sequence of events you might actually learn something from.
I spent years convinced that my repeated relapses were proof of a fundamental defect. That the people who got sober and stayed sober had something I didn’t — more willpower, more faith, a better reason, a harder bottom. What I couldn’t see was that most of them had also failed many times before it held. I just wasn’t counting their attempts. I was only counting mine.
The cultural story around sobriety doesn’t help. We celebrate the person who gets sober and stays sober. We tell that story at meetings, in memoirs, in documentaries. We don’t tell the story of the seventeen attempts that came before. We don’t talk about the Tuesday that ended early, or the resolution that lasted a week, or the six months that came apart at a wedding. Those chapters tend to get edited out. Which means everyone going through them privately assumes they’re the only one.
Getting Closer Is a Real Direction
There’s a version of this idea in a lot of fields that we accept without question. A writer who finishes a bad first draft is closer to a good book than someone who never started. A runner who trains for six months and doesn’t finish their first race is nonetheless a better runner than they were before. A surgeon in their second year makes different mistakes than in their first — not no mistakes, but different ones, which is how expertise is built. Progress and failure coexist all the time in every other area of human development. We just struggle to extend that logic to ourselves when the subject is something we’re ashamed of.
When I finally got sober — genuinely, durably, in a way that has held — it didn’t come out of nowhere. It came out of everything that had happened before. The tools I found, the things I learned about how my own brain worked, the patterns I’d finally mapped carefully enough to recognize — none of that arrived without the attempts that looked like failures. I didn’t succeed despite the relapses. I succeeded partly because of what the relapses taught me, once I stopped treating each one as a verdict and started treating them as information.
What to Tell Yourself Next Time
I’m not suggesting you stop caring whether you succeed. I’m not saying the attempts don’t matter or that relapse is neutral. It’s not. The costs are real and they accumulate. But there is a difference between taking the consequences seriously and interpreting the attempt as evidence that you are broken. One of those responses is useful. The other one just makes the next attempt harder.
If you’ve tried and not made it hold, that counts as something. It counts as practicing a skill that is genuinely difficult. It counts as evidence that some part of you keeps deciding, again and again, that a different life is worth reaching for. It counts as data about where the hard edges are, which means next time you can be smarter about them.
Andy Murray, for what it’s worth, won Wimbledon the following year. He was the first British man to do it in seventy-seven years. He got there by not misreading what his losses meant.
You’re not failing. You’re getting closer. And closer, even when it doesn’t feel like it, is a real direction.
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