Stream of Consciousness?

Write in a Stream on Consciousness

What Neurotypical non-sense is this?

That isn't how my brain works.

It was, when I was a child

When I blurted out every thought that crossed my mind

When I said what I meant, without fear or filter

Then I grew too old for it to be cute anymore

And I was punished for speaking unfiltered truth

I trained myself to filter my thoughts before they left my brain

I placed roadblocks and roundabouts on the way to my mouth

I made that road long and winding

The better to edit myself

Now there are no unfiltered thoughts

Because I trained my brain to filter

The words I speak are final drafts

Run through checks, and edits, and filters

Because for the Neurodiverse

Unfiltered is unacceptable.

This is why it took forever for me to enter anything into this challenge: because I can't write just a stream of words from my brain to the page.

My stream of conciousness had a dam put in a long time ago, and those locks and spillways are there for a reason.

Training myself into mental and verbal filters was a long, slow process that lasted most of my childhood and adolecence. A common Autistic coping technique is 'Scripting', or envisioning how a conversation will go and how you will respond before that conversation happens.

My stream of conciousness starts as an unformed concept only tangentally related to the current topic, and gets checked for coherency, checked again for relevence, then filtered through Unoffensive, Appropriate, and Comprehensive before being driven five-below-the-speed-limit down a narrow mountain path to my mouth, where it is permitted to join the conversation.