It took me a couple tries to get into the Netflix show Sense8, but when I finally did I was moved more deeply than I could've imagined, which is something as I was coming off the breathtaking season 2 of The OA.

What stood out through the course of the show was how it incorporates disparate people with radically different lives into a small community of unity, support, comfort, joy and love. There was a wholistic, unchallenged sense of connection between the characters resonant in a way I don't think I've ever seen in a TV show. No petty arguments, no manufactured dissent for the sake of drama, no characters set up to be opposed to or resentful of one another.

Each character had plenty of action and soap opera drama going on at any given time, and those subplots varied in how interesting or well done they were, but the interactions between the sensate and their companions stood out like a beacon and caused me to experience so much joy. The way they seamlessly moved between self and other, sharing fear and joy as though it were their own, blending knowledge, fear, and hope into something stronger and more resilient than each could be alone. They loved, cared for, listened to, and were kind to each other in a way I found profound, and haunts my thought on community. I have never seen anything like it.

It also gave me an opportunity to face some of the homo- and transphobic splinters still caught in my psyche. Considering relationships and watching scenes I may have been uncomfortable with in the past, I worked to look not with the lingering taught perspective of self serving indignity, but with a desire to see beauty and love however it's expressed and experienced. To see the beauty in a person or a relationship which deserves to be seen, and which makes me a better person by seeing it.

So many things in the world, in me, already bind love to the point of blood and hypoxia. I want to constantly be in the mode of identifying and untying those wires and ropes: celebrating, experiencing, encouraging, and engaging love where ever it struggles to move and breathe, internally and externally.