The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism

by Naoki Higashida

My memory, however, is more like a pool of dots. I’m always “picking up” these dots—by asking my questions—so I can arrive back at the memory that the dots represent.

Firing the question back is a way of sifting through our memories to pick up clues about what the questioner is asking. We understand the question okay, but we can’t answer it until we fish out the right “memory picture” in our heads.

If I’m lucky, I hit upon a usable experience and all is well. If I’m not lucky, I get clobbered by the same sinking feeling I had originally, and I’m unable to answer the question I’m being asked.

in our case, the words we want to say and the words we can say don’t always match that well.

The reason we need so much time isn’t necessarily because we haven’t understood, but because by the time it’s our turn to speak, the reply we wanted to make has often upped and vanished from our heads.

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.

I don’t even remember letting it go until I hear the other person say, “Huh—it looks like he doesn’t want to hold my hand.” That really used to depress me.

It’s this impulse kids with autism have to dart off to anything that looks remotely interesting: this is what we have to tackle.

Whenever I overhear someone remark how much I prefer being on my own, it makes me feel desperately lonely.

So it would help us a great deal if you could just

use our names first to get our attention, before you start talking to us.

At times like these, we’re having “imaginings.” Or not quite imaginings, but we experience pictures or scenes in our minds that pop up out of nowhere. Maybe it’s the memory of something that made us laugh, or maybe it’s a page from a book we read.

The trouble with scattered memories is that sometimes they replay themselves in my head as if they had only just taken place—and when this happens, the emotions I felt originally all come rushing back to me, like a sudden storm.

The hardest ordeal for us is the idea that we are causing grief for other people. We can put up with our own hardships okay, but the thought that our lives are the source of other people’s unhappiness, that’s plain unbearable.

striving for happiness you will arrive at happiness.

But so long as we can learn to love ourselves, I’m not sure how much it matters whether we’re normal or autistic.

People with autism react physically to feelings of happiness and sadness. So when something happens that affects me emotionally, my body seizes up as if struck by lightning.

What matters most is that we learn to feel safe and secure even when the noises strike us.

I think the reason why some kids with autism try to get hold of an object by “borrowing” someone else’s hand is that they can’t tell how far they need to extend their own arms to reach the object. They’re not too sure how to actually grab the object either, because we have problems perceiving and gauging distances.

Each type of food has its distinct taste, color 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. Everything else is about as appetizing as toy food you might be served at a little kid’s “pretend tea-time.”

they just need more time than the average person to come to appreciate unknown types of food?

When you see an object, it seems that you see it as an entire thing first, and only afterward 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 I care about—in fact I’m pretty obsessive about this—is the order things come in, and different ways of lining them up.

People with autism get quite a kick out of repetition.

“When you’re in a strange new place, aren’t you relieved too if you run into a friendly, familiar face?”