In my last relationship, I often felt as if I were under examination. My appearance was criticised in many different ways, and over time I became increasingly aware of myself through somebody else’s eyes. My body, my face, different details of the way I looked — things that perhaps I would never have thought about that much on my own — suddenly seemed to be available for evaluation.

Now I am going through a period in which I am questioning many things about the way I have lived my life, and recently a strange question occurred to me: what if this aesthetic examination I keep trying to pass doesn’t actually exist?

Because when I look backwards, I realise that this didn’t begin with one relationship. That relationship may have intensified it, but the examination was already there. In some form, it feels as though women are entered into a beauty competition incredibly early in life without anybody ever asking whether we wanted to participate. We learn to look at ourselves and assess. Is my body right? Is my face attractive? Do I look young enough, thin enough, sexy enough, feminine enough? What needs improving? What needs hiding? What will somebody else notice?

I remember watching a video some time ago about the enormous pressure women experience to be beautiful, and one question from that idea has stayed with me: why do I have to be beautiful?

Not whether I am beautiful, or how I can finally convince myself that I am beautiful, but why being beautiful is a requirement in the first place. There is something almost radical about asking that, because even many of the conversations intended to free us from beauty standards still leave beauty at the centre. We are told that every body is beautiful, that we need to learn to love every part of ourselves, that we should look in the mirror and recognise our beauty. And perhaps those ideas help many people. But lately I have been wondering whether I need something different.

What if I don’t have to find every part of myself beautiful? I can dislike something about my body. I can have a scar I wish wasn’t there. I can prefer the way one part of me looked ten years ago. I can decide to change something because I genuinely want to change it, or decide to leave it exactly as it is. I can feel beautiful on Tuesday and completely unattractive on Wednesday. And none of those things should determine how much life I am allowed to live.

I don’t want to wait until I pass some imaginary aesthetic examination before I wear something, have sex, let somebody see me naked, be photographed, go to the beach, grow older, take up space, feel desirable or simply exist without constantly monitoring how I look while I am doing it.

And maybe that last part is what fascinates me most: how much of our lives do we spend observing ourselves from the outside? Instead of simply inhabiting our bodies and experiencing something, another version of us seems to be standing across the room watching. How do I look from there? Can they see this? Does this position make my body look bad? Do I look old? Do I look attractive? What are they thinking about me? If instead of watching myself having an experience, I could simply have the experience.

Maybe I have spent far too long preparing for an examination nobody had the right to make me take. And maybe freedom isn’t finally getting a perfect score. Maybe freedom is realising I don’t have to sit the exam at all.