The Reason I Jump: one boy's voice from the silence of autism

by Naoki Higashida

So what do you do in your free time? Because for people with autism, free time is in fact un-free time. ‘You can do whatever you feel like doing, now,’ someone might tell us. But actually, it’s pretty hard for us to find something we do feel like doing, not just like that. If we happen to see some toys or books we’re always playing with or reading, then sure, we’ll pick them up. Thing is, however, that’s not so much what we want to do as something we can do. Playing with familiar items is comforting because we already know what to do with them, so then, of course, people watching us assume, Aha, so that’s what he likes to do in his free time … What I really want to do, however, is to get stuck into some difficult book or to debate some issue or other. We are misunderstood, and we’d give anything if only we could be understood properly. People with autism would be suffering breakdowns over this – all the time – if we weren’t holding ourselves in so tightly. Please, understand what we really are, and what we’re going through.