"I screwed up" vs "I'm screwing up"

I just finished one episode of an American TV series. An old man in it says, "Been trying all my life to get it right. I'm still screwing up." He's talking about how he failed as a father.

Usually when people say "I'm leaving""I am going to the movies this afternoon", they're talking the things they're about to do. So I am a little confused here. If what he's trying to say is that he used to be a bad father, is it okay to simply say "I screwed up"? Dose the man mean that he's and will still be making mistakes in parent-child relationship when he says "I'm still scewing up"?

Solution 1:

"I'm Xing" doesn't necessarily mean the future. For instance, if you say "I'm eating", it's the present tense.

It can be converted to the future tense by adding a timeframe, e.g. "I'm leaving at 6pm".

Putting "still" before the verb means that you had been doing something before, and you're still doing it now. So the speaker in your TV show had been screwing up previously, and he hasn't stopped yet.

It can even be used when the verb describes the future: "I'm still leaving at 6pm." This means that you had previously planned on leaving at 6pm, and those plans haven't changed. This is often used to emphasize that something else has happened that might have caused you to change your plans, but you didn't.