The paradoxical notion of freeing my thoughts by trapping them with words will forever frustrate and fascinate me.

And I say this as someone with little to no inner monologue; what leaves my lips or fingertips are often the initial verbalizations of my thoughts.

And I often worry about the right sequence of words that will express the full range of my thoughts.

I feel like I lose a lot of "cognitive fidelity" in discourse because my thoughts have to be converted into the social currency of verbalization and manipulated and perceived accordingly.

It always feels so very inadequate, as someone much more eloquent than I could ever hope to be phrased it, "[...] like communicating dreams in smoke signals."

Then, when you factor in the social metagame we use language in, matters are significantly more complex because you have to account for not only the semantic fidelity of your thoughts but also pragmatics, prosody, tone, and other contextual cues.

It's also one of the primary reasons I'm working my way through learning American Sign Language (also it's useful to know) because I'm curious about if I would struggle the same way, or perhaps differently.

I've often wondered about the gestural nature of signing vs. the (mostly) non-gestural nature of verbalisation, and if lacking an inner-monologue somehow puts me at odds with words in the sense that having an involuntary inner monologue meant you were able to always have your thoughts and "stream of consciousness" rehearsed and well-prepared for social discourse or communication.

I'm not sure as far as literature goes; I could be far off base.

To paraphrase Kerouac, "One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple."

.. except, in my case, they need not be simple. Being the right ones is good enough.