5 Things Teen Girls Should Obsess Over

Lip gloss and crushes, cellphones and school drama. These are the superficial obsessions adults notice, the reasons that get blamed for falling grades to the downfall of civilization. But what if there was another category? One that involves staying up too late reading Greek tragedies for fun.

Here are five things worth obsessing over:

1. Vincent van Gogh There is something almost rude about how intensely Van Gogh sees the world. The sky is never just blue. It is spiraling, electric, practically vibrating off the canvas. Even his self-portraits feel like they are staring back at you. I have spent an unreasonable amount of time looking at his face in paint, wondering how someone could examine himself that closely and then decide, yes, let’s make this permanent. Obsessing over Van Gogh is not just liking art. It is training your eyes. For a teenage girl who has been told she is “too much” at least once, Van Gogh is proof that intensity can be ingenious.

2. Donna Tartt I first read The Secret History on a rainy Saturday and resurfaced hours later like someone made several morally concerning friends in Vermont. Tartt writes sentences that demand your full attention. You cannot skim her without missing something important. She spent ten years writing The Goldfinch. Ten. In a world where we panic if a text goes unanswered for six minutes, that kind of patience feels ridiculously long and solemn. Obsessing over Donna Tartt is obsessing over depth. It is allowing yourself to care about craft, about atmosphere, about ideas that do not resolve neatly.

3. The Library of Alexandria Imagine the greatest group chat of intellectuals in history and then imagine someone deleting the entire archive. That is the Library of Alexandria. Scrolls stacked ceiling high. Theories about the stars. Medical discoveries. Poems that might have changed someone’s life. Lost to fires, politics, accidents, history being messy. Obsessing over the Library of Alexandria is obsessing over possibility. It’s accepting that knowledge matters enough to mourn. It’s caring about ideas you will never fully access. There is something poetic about wanting to know more than your syllabus requires, especially when teenage girls are accused of caring too much about the wrong things.

4. Millais’ Ophelia Yes, the painting of the girl floating in the river. The flowers are perfect. The water is almost calm. Everything looks serene until you remember the backstory and think about how quickly it all escalated. Millais painted every leaf with obsessive detail. You can practically count the petals. Obsessing over Ophelia is not about romanticizing sadness, but about noticing how art can hold contradictions. Beauty and grief can exist in the same stroke (you’re allowed to feel deeply without apologizing for it; you’re also allowed to analyze why a painting makes you uncomfortable instead of just reposting it with a vague caption).

5. Antigone by Sophocles Antigone is the original “actually, no.” She is told to follow the rules, stay quiet and that authority is absolute. She listens. Then she does what she believes is right anyway.I have carried her story with me long enough that it surfaces whenever I am told to stay quiet. Every time, I am struck by how familiar it feels. Being young often means being managed. Obsessing over Antigone is practicing backbone. It’s asking hard questions, and understanding that standing alone can feel terrifying and still be necessary.

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