No doubt you have given a lot of thought to the problem of who gets to decide what, in our culture, is beautiful: The historical gatekeepers have clung fast to notions of white privilege, of exclusionary and divisive ideas what women should look like. In fact, I would be far more concerned for you right now if your notions of beauty weren’t under question. To what end, beauty? Does it really mean anything? Honestly, screw beauty, I’ve thought many times, I’m done with worshiping at its airbrushed altar, done with writing about the art I’ll never be able to buy and the glowing interiors I’ll never inhabit, the arbitrary standards of self-presentation I’ve absorbed. And then I’m back online contemplating Jil Sander evening dresses on final sale.

The fact that you are turning 40, that you’re at a kind of midpoint, is important here. We’re so busy — by we I mean women — being looked at in the first half of our lives, I wonder to what extent we’re distracted from the force and potential of our own looking. The triumph of creation over passivity, of being the observer rather than the observed, has been the consistent story arc of women in Western art. Sometimes, it is even the subject of the work itself, as in the paintings of Berthe Morisot, in many ways the most radical of the Impressionists, in whose melting brush strokes and increasingly abstracted figuration we can see Modernism coming. But the bigger revolution here, to my mind, has to do with her reversals of gaze: Morisot, who posed for Manet and influenced his style, painted women regarding themselves in the mirror in anticipation of being seen, or looking directly out at us from the canvas with awareness that we are looking at them.

I suppose what I’m trying to get at is that your way of seeing things, including yourself, seems not wholly true or right or your own, and is in dire need of a refresh. It feels reductive and merciless, informed too much by the very aspects of our culture that have become deadening to you. I wonder if what you’re craving is a less placid form of beauty, one that’s in keeping with the richer and more complex person you have become — art that is more than a flawlessly lit and composed image and that demands more of you than a well-trained set of eyes.

In any reflected life, there will be clarifying moments in which you travel to the edge of the shore. Art, at its best, does this mimetically, challenging us to see things differently by offering a set of open questions, rather than a verdict delivered from on high: a field of view that speaks to the times we live in, rather than turning its back to them.