Learning to Handle Setbacks

In the back of Tomás’s notebook, under the chord charts and half-finished lyrics, there was a column of numbers. 4. 9. 3. 12. 6. 2. 8. 5.

Each number was a streak. Each one ended the same way: a slip, a crash of disappointment, and then a strange, heavy freedom. Well, I’ve already blown it. What followed was rarely one slip. It was a weekend, sometimes a week, of doing exactly what he had promised himself he wouldn’t, as if he were punishing himself for failing by failing harder.

Then, eventually, a new page. Day 1. The cycle had been running for almost two years.

#What Bea said

Tomás worked mornings at a café near the train station and played guitar in a band most weekends. One slow afternoon, his coworker Bea mentioned she was coming up on three years without smoking.

“Did you ever slip?” he asked.

“Constantly, the first year.” She wiped down the espresso machine. “But here’s the thing. It was never the one cigarette that got me. It was the pack I bought afterward, because I’d decided I’d already failed. The day I stopped believing that, everything got easier.”

Tomás thought about the column of numbers in his notebook for the rest of his shift.

#The next slip

It came nine days later, after a Saturday gig. He got home at two in the morning, still buzzing from the show, alone in his apartment with his phone. He knew the feeling well.

The next morning, the familiar thought arrived right on schedule: Back to zero. Might as well.

This time, Tomás tried something different. Instead of starting a new page with a new day count, he opened his notebook and wrote down what had happened, like notes on a song that hadn’t worked:

Saturday. Gig ended 11:30. Home at 1:45. Wired, couldn’t sleep. Alone. Phone in bed. Felt kind of empty after the show.

Then he made himself one promise: whatever happened today, the slip would stay one slip. He went for a run, played guitar for an hour, and called his mother. It was one of the hardest ordinary days he could remember, and by the evening, he had done it.

#The pattern

Over the next month, Tomás wrote a short entry every time he slipped or came close. After six entries, he laid them side by side, and the pattern was almost embarrassing in its clarity.

Four of the six were after gigs: late, alone, buzzing with adrenaline and then a sudden emptiness. The other two were Sunday afternoons with nothing planned.

It wasn’t random. It wasn’t a mystery about his character. It was two specific situations, and he could plan for both.

#The post-gig plan

He wrote it on a card and kept it in his guitar case:

After a gig: eat with the band, don’t go straight home. Shower as soon as I get in. Phone charges in the living room. If I can’t sleep, play quietly or record ideas on the old voice recorder.

The voice recorder was his favorite part. On nights when the adrenaline wouldn’t settle, he’d sit on the couch and hum melodies into it until he got sleepy. Two of those late-night ideas eventually became songs.

For Sundays, he joined a five-a-side football game that a regular at the café organized. He was not good at football. He went anyway.

#A different kind of counting

The biggest change was how he measured progress. Tomás stopped writing day counts. Instead, he bought a cheap wall calendar and marked each day green if it lined up with what he wanted, and left it blank if it didn’t.

The first month after Bea’s conversation had twenty-six green days. That was fewer than the longest streak he’d ever had, and it was far better than any month he’d had in two years, because the four blank days were scattered. None of them had turned into a week.

Some months later he noticed that he couldn’t remember his last spiral. He still had slips, though fewer, and when they happened, they were one bad night followed by a normal morning.

#What he tells people now

A younger musician once asked Tomás how he’d “beaten” his habit. Tomás shook his head.

“I don’t think I beat it,” he said. “I think I stopped making it worse. I used to treat every slip like the end of the world, so I’d burn the whole world down. Now a bad night is just a bad night. I write down what happened, I change one thing, and I get on with my day.”

He paused, then added, “Starting over was never my problem. I was great at starting over. I just had to learn how to keep going instead.”