"The Invisible Ninja Fight Club is one of my favorite metaphors for explaining my experience as an autistic person. If you're neurodivergent, I think you'll find it really helpful too. Imagine that you wake up one day and find that you've been given a lifetime membership to the Invisible Ninja Fight Club. And what this means is that 10 times a day, an invisible ninja will jump out and fight you. This makes your life a lot more challenging because there's a lot of things that you might want to do, but you have to fight a ninja to be able to do them. And even when you're not actively fighting a ninja, you are still exhausted and injured from all of the past ninja battles that you had to go through that day. This is basically what it feels like when you're an autistic person trying to exist in a world made for neurotypical needs. You are constantly fighting invisible ninjas of sensory overwhelm, executive functioning limitations, social challenges, all sorts of things that you have to deal with every day that a neurotypical person doesn't. Here's the takeaway. I really hope you listen to this. If you did have to fight 10 ninjas a day, you would realize that it's not fair to compare yourself to the standard set by people who don't have to fight those ninjas. Yeah, sure, you might not accomplish quite as much as somebody who doesn't have to fight the ninjas, but you know what? They don't have to fight the ninjas. You might need a little more recovery time than somebody who doesn't have to fight the ninjas. But again, they don't have to fight the ninjas. In the same way, it's not fair for you to compare yourself to a neurotypical standard because they don't have to deal with the challenges that you have to deal with as an autistic person in a neurotypical world. Also, if you really did have to fight 10 ninjas a day, you'd want those fights to be as easy as possible. So you'd get body armor, martial arts training, maybe recruit a couple of friends to help you in the battle. In the same way, you wanna have the struggles of autistic life be as easy for you as they can be, and that means looking for strategies that you can learn and apply, finding supports, people who can help you. Those small steps might not make a big difference at first, but over time, you can make it so that the different things in your life that are struggles for you are maybe still hard, but not nearly as hard as they are today. So the next time you're feeling burned out or you got self-critical thoughts running through your mind, just remember, you're fighting some tough ninjas, it's not fair for you to compare yourself to a neurotypical person who isn't fighting those ninjas, and you're smarter than the ninjas. You're gonna figure out a strategy that will help you over time get better at better at fighting these ninjas and building the life that you want. If you think this video would encourage somebody else, please forward it onto them, and if you want more content from me in your feed, please like and follow. Dr. Dan, signing off."