"The way of the warrior is resolute acceptance of death."
— Miyamoto Musashi
As an autistic person living in a neurotypical world, every day is a fight.
Each morning, the battlefield rearranges itself. The terrain changes, but the conflict remains. From the moment I open my eyes, I am met with a tidal wave of stimuli—light, noise, motion, expectations—barreling through my nervous system like a storm. It is not unlike standing alone, on foot, as a cavalry charge thunders toward you. The pressure is real. There is no room to retreat. There is no safe place. There is only the fight.
And the fighting never ends.
After more than thirty years of martial arts training, I have developed strategies. You learn, over time, how to survive. If you endure long enough, you become hardened. Your body adapts. Your mind adapts. But there is a cost. Prolonged combat, even unseen, wears down the system. It glitches. It stalls. The long-term strain of existing in a world that was not built for you leaves its mark. Autistic people often pay for their participation in this reality with years of their lives. Our lifespans are shorter—not because we are weak, but because the toll is constant.
For me, the way of the warrior has always carried a different meaning.
Martial arts is not something I chose as a hobby. It was not a sport or a discipline I found one day and decided to pursue. It was survival. It was the only way that made sense. When everything around you is chaos and bloodshed—whether literal or energetic—when control of the environment is impossible, there is only one option: control of the self.
That is the path to mastery.
Not because it saves you. Not because it ends the fight. But because it gives you form. It gives you a stance. It gives you something to stand on, even as the world burns.
To be able to stand in the fire and not flinch—this is the way of the warrior.
It still burns.
You are still dying.
But you meet it with open eyes.
And you do not yield.
True mastery means seeing the fight before it begins – and ending it before it becomes necessary.
I use the term martial artist in a way that differs from how it’s commonly understood. In the mainstream, martial arts are often seen as distinct styles, defined by technical systems, competitive hierarchies, and varying claims to effectiveness — whether in combat sports, self-defense, or historical lineage. Entire schools and communities revolve around these comparisons: which style prevails in the ring, which technique is more "real," which lineage carries more authenticity.
But this is only one dimension.
There are many kinds of people who train what is broadly labeled as martial arts, and they do so for vastly different reasons. A child trains for discipline. A soldier trains to be more effective in warfare. A criminal may train to become more dangerous. Each of these is a particular expression of a larger force — what I call martial energy — shaped by context, identity, and purpose.
Take the soldier. Soldiering is one specific manifestation of martial energy, filtered through its own system of hierarchies, values, codes of conduct, and ideologies. But it is not the totality of the martial. Nor is the fighter in a cage, or the traditionalist in a dojo, or the monk in a temple. These are all lenses — partial, localized, shaped by circumstance.
The martial, as I understand it, is a vast energetic spectrum — a current that runs through the fabric of existence. It spans violence and its containment, destruction and protection, conquest and surrender. It includes not only victory, but loss. Not only health, but injury. Life and death. Annihilation and rebirth. It exists on the biological level — predator and prey — as much as it does in organized warfare, social dynamics, and even in the symbolic dimensions of mythology, philosophy, and religion: the battle between light and darkness, the play of moral and amoral forces.
So what does it mean to be a martial artist?
The term is composed of two parts: martial — the energetic realm we’re discussing — and artist — one who creates.
Like a painter, the martial artist works with a medium. For the oil painter, it is pigment and canvas. For the martial artist, it is the raw, living current of martial energy. And just as painters differ — one precise and technical, another wild and expressionist — so too do martial artists express different facets of the same vast spectrum.
But the essence is the same: an act of creation. An alchemical transformation. The martial artist does not merely repeat forms or memorize techniques. He works with what is available through his body, his psyche, his experience. And through this work, something is created — something is transformed.
This transformation is not inherently moral. It may destroy as easily as it may heal. One hand takes life; the other gives it. What matters is not the outcome, but the engagement with the energy itself — the conscious shaping of that force through practice, awareness, and will.
To be a martial artist is to be an alchemist of the energies of life and death.