#team ben

are you team mia or team ben

i think the reason Never Have I Ever feels so comforting is because of the way they portray teenage relationships, like yes you love multiple people at the same time, you develop intense crushes that last three weeks, you get on and off with people and there's always that one person you can never stop loving.

I want to say something about never have I ever — btw possible spoilers ahead for season 4. I started watching the show a year after my father died, when I was fifteen, in front of my school and I was the one who found him while having a heart attack in our car, strangely enough like Devi’s dad to a point. I started the show, expecting nothing but a flick and in the first episode, I was already crying. Devi was everything to me — she was me in a sense. I followed her along year after year, every season crying my heart out at least once or twice because despite the boys and the “love triangle” the show was always about grief for me — about her dad and the dreams she shared with her dad. I stayed behind on going to college for a year and even thought Devi eventually did get off the waitlist and got into Princeton, that one moment when she was rejected from every single college she had applied to hit home to me. The moment when she talked about how it was the shared dream between she and her father — I felt that. My dad always wanted to be a doctor. He couldn’t because he had to struggle to keep his family together and support his brothers and sisters and later his wife aka my mum and so he became a teacher right after graduating high school when he was seventeen. He always told me he wanted me to be whatever I wanted to be but that he knew I would be a great doctor. When I didn’t get into med school that first year, I thought everything was over. After he died, I was diagnosed with depression and ADHD and I couldn’t afford a therapist or the medication and the medication that I did take for a while made me sleep walk through life so I stopped that and I was alone, in the pandemic, isolated with my friends all getting into too universities, living my dream life and I was stuck. And this show was there. Devi was there. Paxton and Ben made for the love life that I didn’t have (and still don’t lol) and those stories, all of them, got me through the year I stayed behind. I know it sounds dramatic but it’s true. I watched this last season while I’m in med school, procrastinating on studying for my physiology test and even though I still have no idea what I’m going to do, where I’m headed, I know that Devi and I shared a journey. I sobbed during the second half of the fourth season and for once, I didn’t care about the love interests (even though, I was team Ben from the beginning don’t come at me lol I love Paxton as well) and I just cared about her and her dad and everything she accomplished.