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

by Naoki Higashida

As if this wasn’t a tall enough order, people with autism must survive in an outside world where “special needs” is playground slang for “retarded,” where meltdowns and panic attacks are viewed as tantrums,

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.

The three characters used for the word “autism” in Japanese signify “self,” “shut” and “illness.”

When we’re being told off, we feel terrible that yet again we’ve done what we’ve been told not to.

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

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.

In the water it’s so quiet and I’m so free and happy there. Nobody hassles us in the water, and it’s as if we’ve got all the time in the world.

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.