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.

Repeating these is great fun. It’s like a game of catch with a ball.

Children with autism are also growing and developing every single day, yet we are forever being treated like babies.

Even with straightforward “Yes” or “No” questions, we make mistakes.

Both staying still and moving when we’re told to are tricky—it’s as if we’re remote-controlling a faulty robot.

“Look whoever you’re talking with properly in the eye,” I’ve been told, again and again and again, but I still can’t do it. To me, making eye contact with someone I’m talking to feels a bit creepy, so I tend to avoid it.

“Ah, don’t worry about him—he’d rather be on his own.”

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

Even the way we adjust our clothing to match the season, putting on more clothes in winter and fewer in summertime, this can be a very big deal for people with tactile issues. Acting accordingly as situations change is a tough call. More generally, for a person with autism, being touched by someone else means that the toucher is exercising control over the person’s body, which not even its owner can control properly.

Sometimes people with autism start laughing like a hyena or appear to be having enormous fun on their own without any obvious reason for it. You must be wondering, What on Earth’s gotten into him? 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.

Maybe the racket we make will get on your nerves a bit, but please try to understand what we’re going through, and stay with us.

Sure, we may appear to resemble small children—our fondness for gentle, kind, beautiful things—but we tend to prefer simpler, more straightforward stories, not because of childishness, but because we can more easily guess what’s going to happen next. This allows us to stay more relaxed and more engaged.

Because for people with autism, free time is in fact un-free time.

People with autism may look happier with pictures and diagrams of where we’re supposed to be and when, but in fact we end up being restricted by them. They make us feel like robots, with each and every action preprogrammed. What I’d suggest is that instead of showing us visual schedules, you talk through the day’s plan with us, verbally and beforehand. Visual schedules create such a strong impression on us that if a change occurs, we get flustered and panicky.

But being shown photos of places we’re going to visit on an upcoming school trip, for example, can spoil our fun.