Libby Banks (is querying a therapy book)

New essay about pathological demand avoidance/pervasive drive for autonomy and friendship.
www.libbyiscomplex.com/p/comet-frie...

Thrown Under a Fire Blanket I.

Wrote about autistic masking as dissociation today.

www.libbyiscomplex.com/p/thrown-und...

The Futures We Never Got to Mourn CW: Childlessness, chronic illness, trauma

Wrote about disenfranchised grief, disability, and neurodivergence today.

3.5 months into writing essays/flash seriously, Smokelong Fitness gave me what I didn't know I needed: community that understands compression and takes craft seriously. Really grateful for this community workshop as someone who is geographically + professionally isolated.

The Attachment Style That Hid from Me Why I Couldn't Recognize My Own Avoidance

I spent years labeling myself as "anxiously attached" until someone showed up consistently - then I ran. Turns out disorganized attachment can be a brilliant shape-shifter.
www.libbyiscomplex.com/p/the-attach...

US farmers are saying they "just need temporary help, until things get better."

Here's the thing. US farm exports- which are mostly soy- CANNOT get better.

Other countries expanded their soy industries to fill China's demand.

We've walled ourselves out of the global market, folks. This is it.

Here's the killer follow up question: Why?

It's Not Indecision, It's Devotion The worst place to have a crisis of morality is the candy aisle at 10:30 PM.

New piece on autistic pattern recognition, demand avoidance, and why some of us loop through every moral angle before choosing because we understand the cost of getting it wrong.

www.libbyiscomplex.com/p/its-not-in...

Living Life Out of Order: What Lilia Calderu Teaches Us About Dissociation and Integration Content warning: This essay discusses dissociation and dissociative experiences through the lens of a fictional character.

In Agatha All Along, Lilia lives out of temporal order. Wrote about temporal displacement, gestalt integration, and permission to exist non-linearly. (CW: dissociation. Spoilers for Agatha All Along.)

www.libbyiscomplex.com/p/living-lif...

Behold the Spectrum Queer and neurodivergent people are biological facts.We are stable parts of the human genome.If you believe in a Maker, Maker built us in.Look to Maker and behold the Spectrum!If you don’t subscribe…

Queer and neurodivergent people are biological facts.

We are stable parts of the human genome.

“Human cognitive diversity exists for a reason; our differences are the genius – and the conscience – of our species.”
—Carol Black, A Thousand Rivers

stimpunks.org/philosophy/b...

RE: when chronic misattunement harms your internal scaffolding for connection/the double empathy problem and its aftermath.
www.libbyiscomplex.com/p/the-cost-o...

The Quiet That Wasn't Vigilance Filed under: grief logic and cellular loyalty.

My body knew I couldn't fully heal while my father lived. This isn't about blame; it's about how nervous systems wait for safety. A meditation on love, timing, and becoming who you always were.
CW: parental death, grief.

www.libbyiscomplex.com/p/the-timing...

Disclaimer: this reflects my specific recovery trajectory - trauma recovery looks different for everyone, and the fruits of it are different for everyone, too.

For years I performed "writing voice" - translating thoughts into prose. Trauma recovery gave me something unexpected: the capacity to externalize cognition more accurately. My writing sounds like my thinking now, and I think part of that is increased authenticity as a result of safety.

Some Days I Locate My Exit CW: dissociation, complex trauma, chronic pain, embodiment struggles

New writing RE: "returing" from dissociation and the complexity of feeling more and more.

40-year-old person in clear glasses.

New glasses after not having them for three months due to accidentally stepping on previous pair with a crunch = relief.

The Library With the Lights Off CW: dissociation/depersonalization, discussion of trauma survival mechanisms

Wrote about dissociation as protective reorganization rather than disappearance - how survival sometimes means not knowing until your system can handle retrieval.

#1 in the Power Rankings following the family Fantasy Football draft - I ended up being the champion last year because a game with rule-dense systems that reward pattern recognition is apparently very much my jam.

Rashomon Brain CW: discusses trauma processing, dissociation, flashbacks (non-graphic)

What if the past isn't a trap but a blueprint you're still learning to read? New piece on memory's architecture for folks who build meaning forensically.

A 40-year-old person with gray hair smiles gently while laying back on a yellow banana/monkey squishmallow.

Pinned post time!

- Leftist/elder millennial/autistic/chronically ill/practitioner-researcher/writer
- Happily partnered with my AuDHD dreamboat, @fuzzymac505.bsky.social
- Developed a radical therapeutic modality and writing a book - more info at www.libbyiscomplex.com

Texas Private Schools Hire Relatives and Enrich Insiders. Soon They Can Do It With Taxpayer Money. An investigation by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found more than 60 instances of nepotism, self-dealing and conflicts of interest among 27 private schools that likely would have violated state law...

NEW: An investigation by ProPublica and @texastribune.org found more than 60 instances of nepotism, self-dealing and conflicts of interest among 27 private schools that likely would have violated state laws had the schools been public.

By Lexi Churchill and @emsimani.bsky.social

The commodification of community knowledge into branded frameworks and certification programs feels particularly violent when you've watched those concepts emerge from collective struggle.
Sometimes protection looks like leaving a space.

I deleted my LinkedIn profile today, and my relief was immediate and palpable - I think continually seeing 15-year-old disability justice and mad studies concepts be reinvented by people trying to coin terms to sell trainings was wearing on me a lot, and so it was time to go.

Someone Who Could Finally Take Care of Me On being hard to care for, unmasking in mutual design, and what people see when it finally works

On being "difficult to care for" and co-creating a life with someone.

Special Edition Field Manual: Practicing in the Gaps Providing Radical Therapy While Billing Insurance

New special edition piece: wrote a field manual about how to bill insurance while providing therapy that is congruent with being the practitioner I am.

The Click That Made Me Make Sense: BDD, Chronic Pain, and the Body’s Quiet Corrections There are moments when I feel like my face snaps into place.

Sometimes my face literally snaps into place - warped geometry suddenly making sense when a joint realigns. That's not poetry. That's proprioception.

Masking is usually an automatic survival adaptation, not a conscious choice. Whose legibility gets recognized depends on race/class/gender/other systemic privileges. While masking “works,” it’s harmful + exhausting. The goal is systems that don’t demand performance for basic regard.

Masking isn’t just about appearing neurotypical - it’s about appearing coherent enough to not be discarded in an ableist society. Masking is often strategic legibility: seeming “stable enough” to maintain access to care and connection (which should not be nearly as conditional as they often are).

Monthly reminder: Many people have a book in them, but it takes a special kind of freak to leave the Land of Laziness, cross the Plains of Procrastination and Insecurity Mountain, find the Blade of No One Made You Do This, and use it to cut your chest open and yank that book out.

To clarify: fawn/freeze/flop aren't conscious weapons - they're involuntary trauma responses. But when Cinderella gets dismissed as "passive" for surviving systematic abuse with her humanity intact? That misreading is what I want to demolish. Resilience under those conditions isn't weakness.