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

by Naoki Higashida

Q23What’s the worst thing about having autism? You never notice. Really, you have no idea quite how miserable we are. The people who are looking after us may say, “Minding these kids is really hard work, you know!” but for us—who are always causing the problems and are useless at pretty much everything we try to do—you can’t begin to imagine how miserable and sad we get. Whenever we’ve done something wrong, we get told off or laughed at, without even being able to apologize, and we end up hating ourselves and despairing about our own lives, again and again and again. It’s impossible not to wonder why we were born into this world as human beings at all. But I ask you, those of you who are with us all day, not to stress yourselves out because of us. When you do this, it feels as if you’re denying any value at all that our lives may have—and that saps the spirit we need to soldier on. 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.