Haha, I found this genuinely funny. It’s called an internal monologue. Google tells me that it’s the majority position with 30 to 50 percent not having one.

Personally, I find it very difficult to understand how people could not think in words, like you were speaking to another person. Obviously you also have mental imagery and sound etc, so not everything is just words. Internal speech is one channel of thought, but for anything complex I would have thought it was mandatory.

It might be correlated with neurodivergence. But it’s also just correlated with high verbal ability in general, presumably. I find it quite natural to think in complete structured sentences, and it’s often perplexed me why other people seem to find this concept so alien. And no I’m not schizophrenic.

I think I've got this from growing up with a narcissist. Thoughts are constructed and seemingly endlessly whittled to try and create a sentence that can avoid getting belittled.

It's hard to talk in groups, because you have to have a sentence mentally critiqued by 3/4 people in turn, so the topic has usually changed before you can say your piece.

I have done this for my entire life (no diagnosis) ... but I also find it easy to write stories and books.

Your comment made me pause in the "wait, other people don't do that?" way.

What? It's never occurred to me that this isn't entirely normal, I've done it all my life. I thought people without an inner monologue were the unusual ones.