Lateral thought.

I have a theory about this, and I think it's correct. Like way correct. Like the kind of correct that spawns mountains of hubris because obviously I'm smarter than all the psychologists of the 20th and 21st centuries.

That's not quite fair because my hypothesis isn't unique or original, but I still think it outshines modern mental medicine.

Lateral thought describes a mind that tracks two timelines at once. You literally think like two brains in the same skull, processing separate inputs and outputs simultaneously. If you have literal conversations with yourself in your head, you might be a lateral thinker. If you are uncommonly intuitive, reaching conclusions before you're consciously aware of the factors, you might be a lateral thinker. If you have to activate a repetitive motor skill in order to focus your conscious mind on something, you might be a lateral thinker.

Tri-lateral thought is the same thing, but you're tracking 3 or more processes at once. This begins to enter into the realm of a disability, because as I have repeatedly mentioned, the brain is stupid and lazy and easily manipulated. When you've got an actual crowd inside your head, you either learn to control it, or you compensate for it, or you go crazy.

I believe schizophrenia, OCD, ADHD, some forms of autism, and nearly all modern neurodivergence are variations of lateral and tri-lateral thinking, but instead of being taught how to manage it so they can be part of the global forum, people are told they're either special or dysfunctional and need to either rise above or fall beneath society. Your gears don't work in the machine, so you have to be part of a different machine, or sit alone in the spare parts box. Instead of cultivating this fucking SUPERPOWER, it becomes an excuse for patterns of behavior that disrupt normal social functions, including cooperating in work environments. It's a reason to remove oneself from the "normies" among us, creating more division in the population.

Schizophrenia is the only one I'm willing to accept as a condition that needs medical treatment (as in there isn't a non-medical solution for some) probably because I was diagnosed (or misdiagnosed) with a mild version of it in my early high school days and I learned a little about what that meant. In extreme cases, you experience delusions, hallucinations and there's no organization in your thoughts. You're unable to separate reality from imagination. Think extreme sleep deprivation, but multiply it by ten and that's your normal mental state. It was the inspiration for Tom Corwen's disorder in The Autumn Prince.

Like Tom, I got lucky and was introduced to a therapist with unconventional ideas. My "condition" was described to me as "your brain is working faster than your mind can process" and that helped WAY more than anything else, including a short stint on medication (which was horrible, esp. as a tween). 

That's also when someone with similar problems introduced me to the concept of lateral thought. The term isn't used to describe a person who's nonfunctional, it's a term for unusually gifted people. Smart people. The cusp of genius. That alone provides motivation to pursue control over mitigation, because why volunteer to take the easy way out and downgrade your brain with addictive opioids? Why would doctors even fucking recommend it?

I can tell you one reason - pharmaceutical companies make no money off of gifted people, but they make a FOURTUNE from chemically silencing those extra tracks. Or let's call them sub-minds, because that's almost exactly how they function, and it's another concept that helps rein in the chaos.

People with these sub-minds can group them under what I'm going to call an "overmind," the rational part of your being that concatenates variant thought-lines into a coherent, working whole. Everyone who isn't a linear thinker has a version of this, so it's not some fabricated pseudo-psychology. That mind is the administrator, the foreman, the manager, aggregating the outputs and deciding what's important and what's not. A fully functioning overmind can even assign tasks to these sub-minds. Have you ever used a fidget spinner to calm your thoughts? That's you subconsciously assigning a side-quest.

I'm not claiming to be a genius or to have mythical abilities, but wearing those labels is a hell of a lot better than thinking I have OCD or ADHD and using those diagnoses as reasons why I can't be complete, why I shouldn't live a full life among normies. 

I'm also not saying legitimate schizophrenia, OCD, and ADHD don't exist. I also believe that inflammation in the brain is less often diagnosed than it should be, and can also explain some of these notable aberrations, but nobody wants to hear that because the most effective solution for that is to stop eating processed sugar. But what I am saying is that these conditions are often diagnosed as a catch-all, a modern version of "The Vapors," when the majority of people can be taught, or can teach themselves, how to regulate and put those voices in their heads to work rather than be overwhelmed by them.

Am I easily distracted? OMG yes. Do I struggle to separate conversations in social settings? Yes, I do. Do I find alternate ways to execute simple, common tasks because it's easier for me? Absolutely. Does my mind wander off on its own? Yeah, but I've learned to widen my mental depth of field so I don't automatically lose track of what's in front of me.

Those things make you quirky, but not weird. Not broken. Not deviant. Not less or more than human. They don't remove you from society, they don't tell you what you are, what to identify as, or who you should be. It's the same road, it just has more scenery and the occasional wyvern might unexpectedly grace the skies.