I’ve been thinking about it for a while now, and just realized how weird it is, after trying to explain it out loud to a friend who’s also neurodivergent.
I’m curious to know if it’s a common experience with other neurodivergent individuals.
My mind has three different depths:
- a very conscious one, capable of conjuring images and sounds from the void, capable of manipulating at will said images, morph them, move them… I can think « words » and have them be real in my mind
- a conscious but closed one: I can put words in it but without acting on them, only watching them. This one is the weirdest of all. There is a difference for me when I think about « dog » and just « look at the idea of a dog ». There are some things I don’t want to consciously think about (like things that makes me sad or depressed) so instead of thinking about them I’ll put them in this zone. They exist but it’s very different from having the words out loud in my mind, as if I was thinking inside my own mind. It’s like I’m in a museum watching thoughts behind plexiglass
- the dark zone, where I put things I don’t want to think about at all, things I want to forget. It’s literally a foggy dark place made of some kind of fluid darkness with no thoughts shining in it, I have to consciously want and try to pull things from it
A while ago, I read somewhere that the mere thing of being able to conjure images was « rare », like only 25% of people on earth can do it. Somehow I linked this idea to people being neurodivergent but I have no proof or source and I may just have made things up in my sleep or under the shower.
TL;DR: how does your mind works? Mine is weird
Thinking in terms of words and sentences always felt really slow and tiring, so I took the "picture is worth 1,000 words" metaphor literally and just visualize thoughts instead of using words. I could spend a few seconds/minutes piecing together a scene or conversation with words, or I could just instantly see it in my mind and have an innate understanding of the concept or situation, almost immediately.
Of course, this makes it harder for me to communicate verbally (especially since I'm an introvert), so I've had to spend years practicing conversations out loud. And since I think in terms of images, I'm basically translating visuals to words every time I open my mouth. So I can be a bit awkward and fumble over words sometimes. I spent a lot of my youth just lost in my own head, because dealing with the real world was like trying to translate a foreign language in real time. It was exhausting, so I was just the quiet kid growing up. Kept to myself, for the most part, and just absorbed information about my surroundings.
In the novel Hannibal Rising, they explain Lector Hannibal's brilliant mind as a sort of visual hallway, with many rooms branching off of it. Any time he needs information, he takes a mental stroll down the hall and into the various rooms, where he's filed away all sorts of knowledge. It's how he can recollect fine details about almost everything he's exposed to; he visualizes filing it away in a particular room in his mind, so he can go back to retrieve it anytime he wants.
I always loved that concept of a visual recollection, but I feel it's too complicated a visual for myself in particular. It takes time to take that mental stroll down a hallway and go through files in my mind, so I keep it simpler and try to just jump right to the visual I need. If I can't find it, then I can't find it. Trying to keep mental files of everything just seems like way too much work for me, even if it would work as a shortcut to memory recollection.
When puberty first struck me (about 25 years ago now), I found myself in a strange battle for control over my mind. I felt split in two directions: my intellectual side, which I felt was my true self. And my instinctual self; the impulses that tried to betray the strict moral compass I had in place. Almost a sort of Jekyll and Hyde thing, now that I think about it.
I actually had a mini-struggle with this concept of a mental "self" when I was in elementary school. I was obsessive about details and had to do things in a particularly structured way. But I noticed that my peers were very lax about details and just did the bare minimum to accomplish tasks, sometimes very messily. It bothered me, and I spent several weeks agonizing over whether I should relinquish control and just be a messy, disorganized person like my peers, or if I should keep suffering under my mental structure and discipline. I didn't want to stop hyperfixating on minor details, but I felt like life would be less stressful if I could just give up trying and go with the flow. Little did I know I was already suffering from ADHD, even way back then. I wasn't even diagnosed until I was 37 years old.
But as I started to mature both physically and mentally, that split between being "normal" and being "organized" became my instinctual and intellectual sides, and I spent many years fighting to hold true to my morals and personal beliefs. ADHD won in the end, and I refused to give in to my instinctual impulses all my life. And the older I get, the easier it is. As my hormones and testosterone cool off with age, I get less impulsive drives. I'm more careful and more patient, with less effort.
In regards to OP's mental "depths"... I don't like to avoid topics just because they give me a negative vibe or emotion. I'm a realist, and I've always wanted to understand the world I live in, including the good and bad. I don't want to trick myself into a false understanding of the world; I want to see it as it truly is, so there's no misunderstanding a situation I find myself in.
So unlike OP, who has layers of their mind where they tuck away negative thoughts, I prefer to process and deal with them up front, come to some level of understanding, and then file them away. Once I've processed it, then it doesn't hurt me as much in the future and I'm able to deal with it in the moment without freezing up or suffering from emotional reactions when I least expect it.
It makes me more adept at handling real-world situations as they come at me. Which was really handy when I served in the US military. When you're being attacked by an enemy force, you don't have time to be horrified at the carnage around you; you need to be present in the moment and focused on the next step to survival. If something truly shocking happens, I can set that thought aside while I focus on what needs to be accomplished first. Once everything's said and done, then I can sit down and process that shocking situation I dealt with.
TL;DR - I visualize thoughts instead of speaking or forming words in my head, because it's much faster. Also, my ADHD mind is a battlefield, wrestling for organization over impulses. ALSO also, I'm a realist who prefers to process everything up front, good and bad, instead of just tucking away negative thoughts and emotions and not dealing with them.