The other day, with my tiny class of four huddled together in the Louvre museum, my Contemporary Art professor focused her first lecture on the things in art that endure. While we stood in the room of recovered archaic statues and pondered such big questions as "is art made for religious purposes really art?", we came to the idea of idolatry. My professor asked us if people today still had idols--if we ourselves had those we idolized. And so, talk turned to the similarities between today's celebrity obsession, and the iconic figurines on display in the museum.

I've never worshiped a religious idol--for plenty of different personal reasons. But I have, most definitely, spent hours scrolling through the Tumblr tag for my favorite actress, or obsessively torn out pages from magazines to make collage odes to the models I love. But, perhaps even more importantly, I've always had real-life girl idols--girls a few years older than me who I dreamed of being as stylish, cool, and grown-up as. I'm 20-years-old now, and this still hasn't changed. Idolization has always felt, to me at least, like just another part of being a girl. And while there is, of course, no Universal Girlhood Experience™, I've found that most of my friends have often felt the same way.

I remember being in first grade, riding the bus home from school, and begging to sit next to the fifth grade girls who knew all the words to Britney Spears songs and talked non-stop about the many boys they planned to kiss in middle school. Or, spending my evenings at my dance studio, and standing on my tip toes to peer into the room where the older girls took their ballet class, dying to be as graceful and grown up as the teenage ballerinas. Or even coming to college, and spending my first year positively obsessed with how the juniors and seniors managed to ace difficult classes, land killer internships, and still be the coolest girls at every party. There's always been some sort of cool older girl in my life for me to look up to. And throughout the years they've inspired me to dream bigger, dress better, point my toes harder, and listen to a lot more pop music.

Early this fall, the morning after the first big party of the semester--so, a teeming fountain of budding drama--I received two Snapchats from my friend Elise, a first-year. The first, her pouting with the caption: "I need my mom." The second, a knowing smirk and text that read: "Not my real mom. I mean you." I snapped her back and told her we should meet up that afternoon for a tête-a-tête and talk it out. It was then that I realized that I had a group of friends a few years younger than me who looked at me the same way I'd looked at older girls my whole life. And, while I think I've crashed enough first-year dorm movie nights and danced awkwardly enough at parties to prove that I'm still not exactly cool or put-together, it feels so good to be able to pass down advice to my sister class.

So, maybe one day I'll sculpt museum-worthy figurines of all the girls who've inspired me, because if there's one thing in my life that's endured, it's how blessed I've been to be surrounded by girls who've always given me something to look up to.