[2026] Neurodivergent Narratives - Writing Prompt #14
This month, we begin our exploration of complexity and internal contradictions with editor Libby Banks at the helm.
Meet our editor for April, Libby Banks (she/they). Libby is an autistic, chronically ill therapist, practitioner-researcher, and writer whose work explores the full complexity of neurodivergent experience. As the developer of Contextual Systems Therapy and author of the forthcoming Navigating a Hostile Mental Health Care System: The Contextual Systems Therapy Field Guide — which offers twelve original interventions for neurodivergent practitioners and clients navigating a mental health system that pathologizes survival — she brings both clinical depth and hard-won personal honesty to everything she writes.
Libby reads with the same curiosity she brings to the therapy room, drawn to work that is honest, layered, and unafraid of its own strangeness. She values writing that holds contradiction without resolving it too quickly, whether that is grief laced with dark humor, tenderness wrapped in clinical precision, or the ordinary rendered suddenly absurd. She is less interested in polish than in truth, and welcomes pieces that take up exactly as much space as they need.
As April Editor of Neurodivergent Narratives, Libby invites contributors to explore the theme of complexity and internal contradictions — the parts of ourselves that don’t add up neatly, the experiences that resist simple telling, and what happens when we stop trying to make them make sense. She looks forward to reading work that sits with that tension rather than rushing past it.
One of the gifts of therapeutic writing is that it asks us to stay inside an experience long enough to really feel it — not to explain it away or arrive at a tidy conclusion, but to let the writing itself become a form of understanding. This month, that is exactly what we are practicing.
Here’s Libby’s first prompt:
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