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

by Naoki Higashida

Q21Why don’t you do what you’re told right away? There are times when I can’t do what I want to, or what I have to. It doesn’t mean I don’t want to do it. I just can’t get it all together, somehow. Even performing one straightforward task, I can’t get started as smoothly as you can. Here’s how I have to go about things: 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. How smoothly I can do the job depends on how smoothly this process goes. There are times when I can’t act, even though I really, badly want to. This is when my body is beyond my control. I don’t mean I’m ill or anything. It’s as if my whole body, except for my soul, feels as if it belongs to somebody else and I have zero control over it. I don’t think you could ever imagine what an agonizing sensation this is. You can’t always tell just by looking at people with autism, but we never really feel that our bodies are our own. They’re always acting up and going outside our control. Stuck inside them, we’re struggling so hard to make them do what we tell them.