As an adult, I still spend a lot of time thinking about my appearance, but I have benefited from something quite simple: the space and time to sit with the emotional difficulty that can occur around not liking parts of yourself, and to become accepting of it. There is an essay by the novelist Megan Nolan in the New York Times that I often return to in which she reflects on her adolescent obsession with becoming beautiful: “I think now that I idolised beauty so much because I was often embarrassed and ashamed as a teenager and beauty seemed the opposite of embarrassment to me.”