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

by Naoki Higashida

‘special needs’ is playground slang for ‘retarded’, where meltdowns and panic attacks are viewed as tantrums, where disability allowance claimants

I Jump unwittingly discredits the doomiest item of received wisdom about autism – that people with autism are anti-social loners who lack empathy with others. Naoki Higashida reiterates

Naoki testify that the most unendurable aspect of autism is the knowledge that he makes other people stressed out and depressed?

The conclusion is that both emotional poverty and an aversion to company are not symptoms of autism but consequences of autism, its harsh lockdown on self-expression and society’s near-pristine ignorance about what’s happening inside autistic heads.

Our voices are like our breathing, I feel, just coming out of our mouths, unconsciously.

Instead, verbal junk that hasn’t got anything to do with anything comes pouring out of my mouth.

and there were times when I used to wonder why Non-Speaking Me had ever been born. But having started with text communication, now I’m able to express myself via the alphabet grid and a computer, and being able to share what I think allows me to understand that I, too, exist in this world as a human being. Can you imagine how your

Then, where exactly am I looking? You might well suppose that we’re just looking down, or at the general background. But you’d be wrong. What we’re actually looking at is the other person’s voice. Voices may not be visible things, but we’re trying to listen to the other person with all of our sense organs. When we’re fully focused on working out what the heck it is you’re saying, our sense of sight sort of zones out. If you can’t make out what it is you’re seeing, it’s the same as not seeing anything at all.

More generally, for a person with autism, being touched by someone else means that the toucher is exercising control over a body, which even its owner can’t properly control. It’s as if we lose who we are. Think about it – that’s terrifying! There’s

You can’t always tell just by looking at people with autism, but we never really feel that our bodies are our own. They’re always acting up and going outside our control. Stuck inside them, we’re struggling so hard to make them do what we tell them.

To give the short version, I’ve learnt that every human being, with or without disabilities, needs to strive to do their best, and by striving for happiness you will arrive at happiness. For us, you see, having autism is normal – so we can’t know for sure what your ‘normal’ is even like. But so long as we can learn to love ourselves, I’m not sure how much it matters whether we’re normal or autistic.

But I believe that in our case, there’s nothing wrong with us at a nerve level. Instead, it’s actually our emotions that trigger the abnormal reactions.

For those of us who are disturbed by having their hair and nails trimmed, somehow their negative memories are probably connected to the action.

Each type of food has its distinct taste, colour and shape. Usually, these differences are what make eating a pleasure, but for some people with autism, only those foodstuffs they can already think of as food have any taste.

When you see an object, it seems that you see it as an entire thing first, and only afterwards do its details follow on. But for people with autism, the details jump straight out at us first of all, and then only gradually, detail by detail, does the whole image sort of float up into focus. What part of the whole image captures our eyes first depends on a number of things. When a colour is vivid or a shape is eye-catching, then that’s the detail that claims our attention, and then our hearts kind of drown in it, and we can’t concentrate on anything else. Every single thing has its own unique beauty. People with autism get to cherish this beauty, as if it’s a kind of blessing given to us. Wherever we go, whatever we do, we can never be completely lonely. We may look like we’re not with anyone, but we’re always in the company of friends.

But to us people with special needs, nature is as important as our own lives. The reason is that when we look at nature, we receive a sort of permission to be alive in this world, and our entire bodies get recharged.

Just by looking at nature, I feel as if I’m being swallowed up into it, and in that moment I get the sensation that my body’s now a speck, a speck from long before I was born, a speck that is melting into nature herself. This sensation is so amazing that I forget that I’m a human being, and one with special needs to boot.

My mind is forever swaying, this way and that. It’s not that I want to go running off, I just can’t help dashing away to whatever place enters my line of sight. It’s really annoying for me too, because people are always telling me off about it. But I don’t know how to stop it.