PEN15 is a comedy series on Hulu co-created by Maya Erskine, Anna Konkle, and Sam Zvibleman. The series follows fictionalized versions of the creators as 7th graders in the year 2000, and it is cringe comedy at its finest (and most unbearable). The show’s cringiest weapons are its stars: Erskine and Konkle, two women in their 30s acting as 13-year-old versions of themselves alongside an ensemble of literal 13-year-olds. It covers a wide range of classic coming-of-age tropes, and uses a combination of humor, surreality, and surprising poignancy to dig deep into some of the less-explored subjects of teen girlhood: cultural identity, masturbation, and doing whippets in some girl’s garage, just to name a few.

This show is not for the faint of heart when it comes to second-hand embarrassment. Few entries in the cringe comedy canon are quite as piercing as this show, and unless you are ready to open yourself up to intense feelings of empathy-fueled shame, steer clear. The reaction this show provokes in me is strongly tied to my own experiences, so I thought it might be fun to sort through some of them and figure out what it is about PEN15 that has lodged it so sharply into my heart. 

In the year 2000, I was in the third grade. This show is not my exact experience, but it is certainly in my personal sweet spot of pre-pubescent relatability. When I entered the 7th grade four years later, not much had changed, although I did have better access to higher quality internet and no longer had to suffer through the nightmare of sound that starts a dial-up connection. My friends and I all had screennames which we thought were “random” and therefore “funny.” Mine was frankTHEeggplant. Why? I just told you, because it’s RANDOM. Duh.

On the show, Maya’s “relationship” with flymiamibro over AIM reminded me of so many ill-advised conversations I had with strangers on the internet in my youth. It also reminded me of the fact that my first real boyfriend was someone I talked to as a “friend” exclusively via AIM for a full year before I had the courage to have a full conversation with him IRL — this was a boy who went to the same high school as me and who I saw on a daily basis. When you’re a teenager, it feels so much easier to connect with someone when you don’t have to look them in the eye. In person, I always got so nervous, stumbling over my words and resorting, like Maya, to being mean to anyone of interest because it was easier to seem like I didn’t care than to make myself even a little bit vulnerable. Online, I could test out all of the stupid romantic language I’d heard but never used, pretend to be someone who knew what I was supposed to say. 

Like Anna, there were boys I went to middle school with who I had entire relationships with in my head. My friends and I had codenames for them, and we would lose our entire minds whenever one of them walked by. One of my favorite bits on PEN15 is that whenever Anna is talking about Maya’s crush or Maya is talking about Anna’s, the other girl freaks out and hiss-whispers, “Oh my god, he’s literally right there and you’re literally talking so loud, can you please be quiet.” It’s hilarious because they’re talking in totally normal voices that the crush in question definitely can’t hear, but also because I remember that exact feeling, the molten panic of talking about someone and the possibility that they might know you’re talking about them. 

So much of this show is about the panic of being seen. Anna and Maya are so terrified by the potential for embarrassment that the lengths they go to to avoid it end up embarrassing them tenfold. The storyline that starts in the first season and carries into the second about Maya getting her period is especially hard to watch knowing that if she’d simply told a single soul about what was happening to her, she could have avoided the resulting disaster. Then again, what would I have done? I did get my period in the 7th grade, at 13, but I wasn’t the first of my friends. I remember feeling like Anna, jealous that other people had arrived at the destination (“adulthood”) before me. 

And that’s another thing that PEN15 conveys so well: our obsession, as young people, with growing up. At the beginning of the series, Maya and Anna are still playing pretend with Sylvanian dolls, and we watch in real time as they begin to lose interest in it as a hobby, both because they get teased for its childishness and because the magic of it is genuinely beginning to wane. I remember playing with Bratz dolls far past the point that it was acceptable to admit I was still playing with Bratz dolls. I desperately clung to it, this thing that I had loved so much for so long. I thought I’d be able to play with dolls forever, but in middle school I could start to feel myself forcing it. Losing it wasn’t even a choice—it was like a skill I’d forgotten. 

Once childhood starts to slip away like that, something has to replace it. Identities are tried on and exchanged. Anna is a singer and musician, and thinks of herself as the performer of the duo, but later, when she doesn’t get a role in the school play, she feverishly adopts the identity of unbearable techie. Meanwhile, Maya, cast in the play’s leading role, assumes her rightful position as unbearable theater kid. In the 8th grade, my middle school put on a production of Guys and Dolls, and I was devastated not to be cast, especially because I was 100% certain that I would someday be a famous singer. My friends and I instead became the makeup crew, and except for the one time I applied extra heavy magenta lip liner on my sworn nemesis for his performance as Nicely-Nicely Johnson, we took our positions very seriously. I’m quite certain we were unbearable, too.

In perhaps the greatest episode of season two, “Vendy Wiccany,” Maya and Anna believe they’ve been bestowed with magic powers and briefly become obsessed with witchcraft. Watching the two of them “cast a spell” in the school greenhouse is one of the funniest moments in the season, in part because of the reactions of their peers who catch them, followed by their own reactions to being caught: doubling down and shrieking in tongues. I am proud to say that I still own many books about witchcraft, but my first was called Teen Witch: Wicca for a New Generation, which I came across at Barnes and Noble and knew that I absolutely had to have based on the extremely cool outfits the teen witches of the cover illustration were wearing. I learned about the Rule of Three, and how to cast a sacred circle in my bedroom. If you don’t know what either of these things are, you should probably read Teen Witch: Wicca for a New Generation.

Anyway, while PEN15 brought back early Wiccan memories, it also brought back an even earlier witch-related experience. I spent much of my adolescence hanging out around the apartment complex where I lived, where I made a few of my closest friends at the time. In middle school, we were bullied mercilessly by a group of boys from the complex who were a couple of years older than us. We decided that our best course of action was to convince them that we were witches and that we’d curse them if they didn’t leave us alone. One of my friends’ mom was from Romania, and my friend taught the group of us to say “I will cut off your toe” in Romanian, a phrase we would chant ominously any time the bullies started to bother us. We paired the spell with practiced “death glares” directed at our tormentors, and our strategy actually worked. The bullies left us alone, either because they were afraid we would cast spells on them or because they simply didn’t want to be associated with our weirdness.

There’s so much more that this show brought up for me in the watching, because some of the storylines parallel my personal experience even further than the things I’ve already mentioned. Anna’s parents’ divorce struck a particular cord with me, as my own parents went through a similarly spiteful break-up when I was 9 years old (during the very same year this show takes place). But I think the main reason I see myself so much in Maya and Anna is because I, too, was always trying to be funny and “weird” in a way that other people often found off-putting. I had friends, but I was not “cool,” and I desperately wanted to be, while also desperately wanting to be seen as “unique” and “different.” I’m using so many quotation marks in this blog post because none of these things I thought I wanted to be were based in objective reality; they were ideas perpetuated by all 13-year-olds, standards we held ourselves to, born of our own insecurities. Looking back on some of the things I struggled with, I’m struck by how funny it all seems, how small. At the time, everything felt gigantic and insurmountable. 

PEN15 manages an incredible balancing act between these two worlds — the one where we live now, looking back on how ridiculous we were, but also of our past selves: how eager we were, how shameful that was, and how the stakes of each social interaction felt worthy of a Tony Award-winning play. PEN15 is one of the funniest shows we have right now, but it also has so much empathy and tenderness for Anna and Maya that on multiple occasions it’s brought me to tears. Maybe because I’m feeling that empathy for them too — but more likely it’s because I’m feeling it for my 13-year old self, a gift I never gave myself at the time.