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

by Naoki Higashida

True compassion is about not bruising the other person’s self-respect.

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.

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.

There’s also the dread that by being touched our thoughts will become visible. And if that happened, the other person would really start worrying about us. You see? We put up a barricade around ourselves to keep people out.

The reason is that imitating movement is difficult for people with autism.

All I know is that I have to get out of the situation as soon as I can, so I don’t drown. To get away, I’ll do anything. Crying, screaming and throwing things, hitting out even…

1. I think about what I’m going to do. 2. I visualize how I’m going to do it. 3. I encourage myself to get going.

When we sense you’ve given up on us, it makes us feel miserable. So please keep helping us, through to

the end.

To give the short version, I’ve learned 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.

When I’m jumping, I can feel my body parts really well, too—my bounding legs and my clapping

hands—and that makes me feel so, so good.

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.

For me, I have no clear sensation of where my arms and legs are attached, or how to make them do what I’m telling them to do.

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. By constant practice, however, we should be able to overcome this difficulty.

Instead, it’s actually our emotions that trigger the abnormal reactions. It’s only natural for anyone stuck in a bad place to try to get out of it, and it’s my own despair that causes me to misread the messages my senses are sending me.

So it’s not necessarily physical pain that’s making us cry at all—quite possibly, it’s memory.

Unchanging things are comforting, and there’s something beautiful about that.

People with autism get quite a kick out of repetition. If I was asked how come, my reply would be this: “When you’re in a strange new place, aren’t you relieved too if you run into a friendly, familiar face?”

Numbers are fixed, unchanging things.

That simplicity, that clearness, it’s so comforting to us.

Invisible things like human relationships and ambiguous expressions, however, these are difficult for us people with autism to get our heads around.

All that said, when our obsessive behavior isn’t actually bothering anyone, I’d ask you just to keep a quiet eye on us. It won’t last forever. One fine day, however hard we have tried to will ourselves to stop before, the obsessive action suddenly stops itself, without warning—like,