“People are always saying you should be yourself, like yourself is this definite thing, like a toaster,” says Angela Chase, played by Claire Danes in the short-lived 90s TV show "My So-Called Life." In one short and witty sentence, Angela Chase captures the meaning of adolescence.

In the time period when most college millennials were born and flannels and Doc Martens were at their zenith, "My So-Called Life" aired on ABC, exploring the complexities and angst of being a teenager, while still remaining relevant today.

In the first episode of the series, Angela dyes her hair a fiery red color (“it’s not red, it’s Crimson Glow,” she says), creating not only a fashion move that has inspired many moody teenagers since, but a statement about what it means to be an adolescent girl on the brink of womanhood, a time when confusion runs rampant and who we are becoming is as electric and scintillating as well, a toaster. Angela bumbles through the first episode armed with the insecurities of a typical teenager, her insecurities and worries almost predictable.

The series begins when Angela starts to distance herself from her friend of many years, Sharon, to hang out with her new friends Rickie and Rayanne.

The episodes that follow navigate the trifecta’s humorous ventures into the realm of adolescence, not sparing the taboo or tricky. The show intentionally veered toward the uncomfortable, with discussion of rape, sexuality, drug abuse, alcoholism and the heartbreak and loss of simply unmasking the messiness of life.

While the show dealt with heavy topics, it also dealt with the humorous and stereotypically teenager ones like getting a zit and emphatically dancing to Blister in the Sun.

But even in the show’s humorous moments there’s a level of depth unmatched by any teenage drama since. Each time Angela narrates an episode, she lets us into the inner workings of her mind, she says things that at are at times obscene and caustic, other times funny and sharp. She exists like most teenagers do, in a bubble of her own existence where everything and nothing is a crisis.

I first watched the show my freshman year of high school when I was the same age as the fifteen year old Angela Chase. Angela represented to me the pieces and remnants of who we all are, who we are all trying to become.

I couldn't exactly relate to each life-event experienced by Angela, I was never rebellious or particularly angsty, but good shows and works of fiction don't have to mimic one's life experiences in order to be relatable. What resonated with me was how Angela felt about the world, I empathized with the meaningless of adolescence and wrestling with the trite idea of "finding myself."

In some ways the show is the outsider's ambrosia, we feast on the newfound knowledge that someone else gets us, that we are not as strange or as odd as we think.

At the end of the first episode when Angela sees her father with another woman and R.E.M.'s Everybody Hurts begins to play, we think of ourselves, because the highest forms of art are the ones that generate introspection (well that, and we can be very self-pitying).

While we may admire Angela Chase for her honesty and bluntness, she is in no way a role model for her teenage audience.

But she’s also not supposed to be.

Angela is all of us, and watching her pout onscreen, if only for a single season, indulges our own feelings of insecurity and doubt as she articulates the feelings that we cannot.

Everybody hurts, and Angela Chase just did it with us.