A man I once loved told me that his greatest disappointment came when his dreams came true.

A lifetime of struggle and self loathing and promises to himself that one day he would do it all led him to one day, when he did, in fact, do it. And when he arrived at the golden moment in time, where his career and his health and all the other building blocks suddenly clicked into place and the mysterious door unlocked, he found himself starting into nothing. Because all that happened was the finish line had disappeared. There was no Nirvana. Just another race, an endless Escher staircase winding up and around and back again. Dizzying and rhizomatic.

I’ve had a melancholy week. Like this former love of mine, I find myself at a finish line of my own creating, wondering why I don’t feel like a winner yet. I have a home that I love, a safe job, and a community of dear friends who love me. My daughter is safe, and happy, and flourishing. But instead of feeling like I have won, my mind strays to what I am yet to win, and I am as unhappy as I was a year ago in a time when I had so much less. I am tired and that tiredness feels so endless. I feel like I’m losing.

I think about what I need to do to start feeling better, empowered. I keep reading that it’s important, as solo parents, to remind ourselves of all we are acheiving. We live in a bit of a vacuum, you see. And with no family nearby either, I lack witnesses in my everyday wins. Where a partner would normally applaud doing the dishes after a long day or getting up at 3am to change a nappy, I do it alone, and often forget how hard it is. But how do you actually… do that? Is it a laundry list of achievements I read through with my morning coffee? “Made bed - tick. Turned up to job without throwing my coffee in anyone’s face - tick. Cleaned up cat vomit off the new cream carpet - tick.”

In these weeks, I think about what gets me closer to one of my most pressing finish lines — happiness. I’m sick of feeling so sad all the time. But what do I need? Is it therapy? More writing? Less writing? A new job, perhaps? A new love interest? Losing weight or cleaning out my closet or planning a holiday? I know, of course, that the monotony of everyday life weighs heavily on an artist: I am hemmed in by responsibility, with so little of my life feeling empty enough to entertain possibility. When, between the cooking and cleaning and working and commuting and mothering do I get to sit and dream? It is the curse of all mothers, perhaps, to spend much of their life grieving what could have been. The finish line, always out of reach.

So, let’s talk about finish lines. What I am figuring out -- so very, very late in life -- is that they don’t exist. Never did. They are just frameworks we erect to give ourselves a sense of safety. Life is not a series of accomplished projects; life is a infinite stretch of murky cloudland, no beginning and no end and certainly no pathways. And to most, that is terrifying.

The finishing lines I have created in recent years were survivalist in nature. Leave my husband. Move city. Find a house. Make friends. Make money. Feed my daughter. Keep myself clean and healthy. For a while there, the wins worked. Oh, the relief I felt the day I found out I had won my dream job in Sydney. I had done it! I was finally feeling close to the person I knew I could be when I wasn’t simply launching from one survival chapter to another. I was close to winning. But just as quickly as I crossed that finish line I looked around and saw nothing but long hours and interstate commutes and a crushing realisation that, at this time in my life, I simply could not juggle single parenthood and my dream job. The finish line disappeared into the clouds.

The finish line currently preoccupying my mind, as you might be able to tell, is love. With every year that slides past and every wrinkle that appears I find myself facing the bald fact that I may never be witnessed in love. My years of being young and pretty might never be witnessed by anyone apart from myself. And I wonder if that, in some way, fuels the endless stream of dates. Because what is a date, after all, if it is not just a desperation to be seen? I think of all the men, the strangers, who have walked away with a small piece of me, when all I wanted was one man to have all of me. Another finish line dances tantalisingly close. I am always just one date away from everything being perfect.

Perhaps the finish lines have been a way to deal with the exhaustion of life. It’s a motivation to keep going, to distract us from the forever-ness of it all. Just a little more. One more push. C’mon, you’ve made it this far. Keep on going. What would happen without goals, or dreams, or ambitions? Do you just float, adrift? When I think of people with no goals or ambitions I think of someone quite fractured from functioning society; a hermit, a runaway, isolated and insane. But maybe there is a peace in that space that I so desperately need. It’s something I have been thinking about quite a lot of late, actually. What if I did just give up? What if I took all pressure off myself to make money, be successful, be beautiful, find a partner? What lies on the other side of that paralysing pressure?

If there’s no finish line, there’s no race. If there’s no race, there’s no pressure to keep up. And if there’s no pressure to keep up, maybe -- just maybe -- there’s a space to just live.