Compression as Neurodivergent Praxis

I. Entry: Compression as Unveiling, Not Hiding

People often misread the speed of my reading - I have been unjustly accused of carelessness or skimming more times than I can count. What I am actually doing is searching for structure, not surface. It’s walking into a laundromat with odd ceiling slopes and stained-glass arches that don’t belong. There’s a faint afterimage: “This used to be a Pizza Hut.”

This is bottom-up processing in its most intimate form - following clues and anomalies to discover meaning. There’s comfort in not naming the structure before you understand it and in trusting that sensing comes before describing.

I experience reading and writing as processes with aligned goals - one finds existing structure; one reveals built structure. Both skip surface for skeleton.

II. Bottom-Up Processing: Gatherer, Not Filler

I make meaning in the way I understand a room.

Detail is invitation. The “irrelevant” is often what outlives the intended story. I work with the tension of gestalt recognition: the way small clues accumulate and reveal a pattern. Others might assign meaning from above, painting a mural over cinderblock. I tend to build scaffold first, fragment by fragment, and let the form declare itself - would it rather be a Pizza Hut that is now a laundromat, or a laundromat that used to be a Pizza Hut, or does it even really matter - all are viable options, and I approach with curiosity and tenderness.

This is intentional architecture. What looks like “missing steps” is declining to show redundant work. The compression on the page reflects processing that occurred before writing began.

III. Compression: The Intimacy of Gaps

Compression, in my writing, is about offering - a kind of handshake in negative space. When I write, every refusal to overexplain signals trust in the reader: you’ll leap with me.

A compressed paragraph isn’t a riddle to be solved; it’s a miniature blueprint. Each sentence is structural. Comfort is important though precision and integrity take top priority. The gaps between statements are chances to notice what’s load-bearing and what’s intentionally left unsaid. The risk is that you’ll miss my intent, but the hope is that you find resonance.

Editing is fierce intimacy. What’s not structural is quietly removed, often mourned. This discipline is devotion to shape.

When people call my writing “cryptic,” “dense,” or “too fast,” I hear possible impatience with the negotiation of shared logic. I’m not writing for maximal ease; I’m seeking kindred readers who think in patterns that emerge from minutiae. For these readers, my compression is a bidding for honesty and accord: “Yes, Libby, I see the Pizza Hut too.”

IV. Metaphor: Translation Rather Than Decoration

Metaphor is the carrying beam of my craft. When I say “Pizza Hut under the laundromat,” I am sending a flare to communicate what detail-heavy perception knows.

Metaphor in this practice functions as both shortcut and entryway. I am not offering the full home tour or the annotated blueprint; I’m giving a key to a secret entrance. Metaphor is a way for the structure to declare itself without insistence, left on the page for other thinkers to detect and inhabit and fiddle with.

V. Risk and Gift: An Accounting of Structural Compression

Readers may interpret efficiency as absence, but what reads as “skipping steps” is actually showing finished processing. This comes from epistemological difference: I’m offering structure; they might expect scaffolding. Both are valid but fundamentally different approaches to writing.

Scaffolding is necessary during construction. Once my architecture can hold, scaffolding comes down. Compression is knowing when structure no longer needs visible support.

It is isolating, sometimes painfully so, but for those of us built by contradictions this style is one of the most trustworthy forms available. If you also see the antique tile beneath today’s linoleum, then you might understand.

This tension reveals an unspoken assumption in writing: that the work of thinking should be visible on the page. There’s thinking as process and thinking as structure. Compression shows structural thinking - the architecture of the idea. It doesn’t show developmental thinking. For bottom-up processors, showing the gathering process would obscure - or forcibly define - the pattern that emerged. Compression is how gestalt recognition translates into linear form.

VI. Writing as Translation, Not Transmission

Writing, for me, resists a thesis-first, outline-driven process.

I do not write to show how I arrived, but to reveal what can stand. My writing process emerges as excavation. Tracing what resists erasure means uncovering the essential, and then the structure is built bottom-up, fragment by fragment. I do not fill my blueprints; I reveal them.

Last week, my piece “What Venus de Milo Taught Me About ‘Broken’ Bodies” appeared in the winter issue of Wordgathering - check it out. https://wordgathering.com/vol19/issue2/creative-nonfiction/banks/