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

by Naoki Higashida

During my frustrating, miserable, helpless days, I’ve started imagining what it would be like if everyone was autistic. If autism was regarded simply as a personality type, things would be so much easier and happier for us than they are now. For sure, there are bad times when we cause a lot of hassle for other people, but what we really want is to be able to look toward a brighter future.

I imagine a normal person’s memory is arranged continuously, like a line. 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.

Children with autism are also growing and developing every single day, yet we are forever being treated like babies. I guess this is because we seem to act younger than our true age, but whenever anyone treats me as if I’m still a toddler, it really hacks me off. I don’t know whether people think I’ll understand baby-language better, or whether they think I just prefer being spoken to in that way.

Isn’t there a belief out there that if a person is using verbal language, it follows that the person is saying what they want to say? It’s thanks to this belief that those of us with autism get even more locked up inside ourselves.

“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. Then where exactly am I looking? You might well suppose that we’re just looking down, or at the general background. But you’d be wrong. What we’re actually looking at is the other person’s voice. Voices may not be visible things, but we’re trying to listen to the other person with all of our sense organs. When we’re fully focused on working out what the heck it is you’re saying, our sense of sight sort of zones out. If you can’t make out what you’re seeing, it’s the same as not seeing anything at all.

A person who’s looking at a mountain far away doesn’t notice the prettiness of a dandelion in front of them. A person who’s looking at a dandelion in front of them doesn’t see the beauty of a mountain far away. To us, people’s voices are a bit like that. It’s very difficult for us to know someone’s there and that they’re talking to us, just by their voice. 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.

We do remember what we did, when, where, who we did it with and things like this, but these memories are all scattershot and never connected in the right order. The trouble with scattered memories is that sometimes they replay themselves in my head as if they had only just taken place—and when this happens, the emotions I felt originally all come rushing back to me, like a sudden storm. This is a flashback memory.

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.

Us kids with autism would like you to watch out for us—meaning, “Please never give up on us.” The reason I say “watch out for us” is that we can be made stronger just by the fact you’re watching.

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.

But when I’m jumping, it’s as if my feelings are going upward to the sky. Really, my urge to be swallowed up by the sky is enough to make my heart quiver. 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. So that’s one reason why I jump, and recently I’ve noticed another reason. 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.

the memory of a person with autism isn’t like a number-scale from which you pick out the recollection you’re after: it’s more like a jigsaw puzzle, where if even just one piece is misinserted, the entire puzzle becomes impossible to complete. What’s more, a single piece that doesn’t belong there can mess up all the surrounding memories as well. So it’s not necessarily physical pain that’s making us cry at all—quite possibly, it’s memory.

So why do these people experience new food this way? You could say, “Because their sense of taste is all messed up” and be done with it. But couldn’t you also say that they just need more time than the average person to come to appreciate unknown types of food? Even if they’d be happy sticking with only those foods they’re used to eating, in my opinion meals aren’t just about nutrition—meals are also about finding joy in life. Eating is living, and picky eaters should definitely be nudged toward trying different foods little by little. That’s what I reckon, anyway.

“But the eyes we all use to look at things work the same way, right?” Fair enough, you may be looking at the exact same things as us, but how we perceive them appears to be different. When you see an object, it seems that you see it as an entire thing first, and only afterward do its details follow on. But for people with autism, the details jump straight out at us first of all, and then only gradually, detail by detail, does the whole image sort of float up into focus. What part of the whole image captures our eyes first depends on a number of things. When a color is vivid or a shape is eye-catching, then that’s the detail that claims our attention, and then our hearts kind of drown in it, and we can’t concentrate on anything else.

As autumn comes around the year’s corner, the cicadas’ lives come to an end. Human beings still have plenty of time in store, but we who have autism, who are semidetached from the flow of time, we are always uneasy from sunrise to sunset. Just like the cicadas, we cry out, we call out.

I’m not a big fan of TV commercials in and of themselves, but when a familiar ad comes on, I get quite excited about it. This is because when a familiar one comes on I already know what it’s talking about, and I feel sort of soothed knowing that they never last for long. The reason why we look happy to your eyes while we’re watching TV ads must be that at all other times we’re less stable and calm, and our faces are blanker. Perhaps what you’re getting when you look at us watching commercials on the TV is a brief glimpse of the Real Us.

The reason I can’t run well once I’m aware of needing to isn’t to do with nerves. My problem is that as soon as I try to run fast, I start thinking about how I ought to be moving my arms and legs, and then my whole body freezes up. And another reason I don’t do well in races is that I don’t really get any pleasure out of beating other people. I agree that it’s right and proper to do the best you can in a race, but this desire to beat everyone else is another matter altogether. So on competitive occasions like school sports days, the pleasure I get just by being there takes over, and I’ll end up running the race with all the urgency of someone skipping his way across a meadow.

I think that people with autism are born outside the regime of civilization. Sure, this is just my own made-up theory, but I think that, as a result of all the killings in the world and the selfish planet-wrecking that humanity has committed, a deep sense of crisis exists. Autism has somehow arisen out of this. Although people with autism look like other people physically, we are in fact very different in many ways. We are more like travelers from the distant, distant past. And if, by our being here, we could help the people of the world remember what truly matters for the Earth, that would give us a quiet pleasure.