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Excuse any incoherence in this – it’s more of a ramble than any kind of formal essay, as I wrote it while drowsy.

Something I’ve been thinking about lately is the fact that we are a system of independent and separate people who are nonetheless very connected. Sometimes, I see systems online exploring their own experiences and trying to determine how separate their system members are, and sometimes, people point to sharing emotions as a sign that they and their system members are not fully independent people. This generally causes me to reflect on how we see our emotional interconnectedness as something separate from any question of independence or separate personhood – we often feel similar to a group of separate people who are nonetheless connected by a web of psionic tethers. Many people here used to be a bit anxious about mentioning this because being considered separate people was important to them, and they worried our interconnectivity undermined that. I personally think it’s interesting to explore and talk about, however.

We can feel each other’s emotions when we’re in proximity to each other, and the stronger the emotion, the more powerfully the feeling transmits. Sometimes a fronter will be overwhelmed with sorrow or anger, only to realize that they have no idea why they’re upset – because someone else is in coconsciousness and bleeding emotion into everyone nearby. Other system members’ surface thoughts tend to be perceptible, too, in the form of shallow impressions. I might not be able to hear what a person’s thinking word for word, but I can tell when they’re guarded or relaxed, whether they like me or hate me, etc. Understanding the precise meaning of things system members say is easier than with external people because we can feel their intent as they speak their words. It’s as though every person in our system is surrounded by an invisible aura that we can feel rather than see. It adds a layer of transparency to conversations that can be embarrassing. A romantic crush is never really secret, for example.

This isn’t to say that we can’t hide things from each other. Some people are able to mask their emotional and mental impressions with relative success. Celegorm used to make a joke of lying to our human system members about elven life and biology, and no one got the sense that he was lying because he was driven more by glee than sly deception. And people who are keeping secrets tend to do better at it when they don’t ruminate on it – whereas someone who is anxious about a secret they’re keeping is like a glowing beacon of “clearly hiding something.”

Reflecting on it, I suppose the information we glean from our interconnectedness is only just a bit more than you’d get if you were studying a person’s body language. Instead of sensing a person’s frustration by the furrow of their brows and the frown on their face, it’s more like feeling the heat of frustration in your own breast as you speak to them. Many of us are bad at reading body language, and others are bad at reading body language in that they anxiously read too much into it, so perhaps it’s a blessing that we can simply sense these cues in each other instead of relying on clumsy interpretations. In the long-ago early days here, there was nothing but void with sparse pockets of visual space, disjointed rooms that bled back out into void again, and the people here felt more like disembodied voices and spirits jostling for primacy inside of our head. Developing a mechanism for “reading body language” between formless, nameless spirits would have been quite useful, so perhaps that’s why this state came about.

Fern used to like trying to write snippets of prose describing events in headspace because they were enamored with the idea of capturing this feeling in prose, of describing the way we naturally interact. I don’t know that they ever posted much of it, if any at all, especially since the sense I get is that they were never satisfied with how they depicted the phenomenon in prose. Often, they would write about when we comforted each other, and how we can feel our “auras” of emotion and thought overlap and curl around each other. For all that we lose in privacy with each other, we gain in intimacy. When I’m around people here who care particularly strongly about me, I feel the love billowing off of them like a fragrant and comforting perfume. It wraps me up, just as my fondness for them wraps them up, and we are able to luxuriate directly in our affection for each other. It makes spending time with internal friends particularly lovely.