In The Reason I Jump, Naoki Higashida, a 13-year-old autistic boy, answers 58 questions he thinks others wonder about him, from “Why do you like spinning?” to “Would you like to be ‘normal’?” His startling, moving insights offer a rare look inside the autistic mind. Below, five of the questions from this small but profound book.
Why do people with autism talk so loudly and weirdly?
People often tell me that when I’m talking to myself my voice is really loud, even though I still can’t say what I need to, and even though my voice at other times is way too soft. This is one of those things I can’t control. It really gets me down. Why can’t I fix it?
When I’m talking in a weird voice, I’m not doing it on purpose. Sure, there are some times when I find the sound of my own voice comforting, when I’ll use familiar words or easy-to-say phrases. But the voice I can’t control is different. This one blurts out, not because I want it to; it’s more like a reflex.
A reflex reacting to what? To what I’ve just seen, in some cases, or to some old memories. When my weird voice gets triggered, it’s almost impossible to hold it back—and if I try, it actually hurts, almost as if I’m strangling my own throat.
I’d be okay with my weird voice on my own, but I’m aware that it bothers other people. How often have the strange sounds coming out of my mouth embarrassed me nearly to death? Honest, I want to be nice and calm and quiet too! But even if we’re ordered to keep our mouths shut or to be quiet, we simply don’t know how. Our voices are like our breathing, I feel, just coming out of our mouths, unconsciously.
Would you like to be “normal”?
What would we do if there was some way that we could be “normal”? Well, I bet the people around us—our parents and teachers—would be ecstatic with joy and say, “Hallelujah! We’ll change them back to normal right now!” And for ages and ages I badly wanted to be normal, too. Living with special needs is so depressing and so relentless; I used to think it’d be the best thing if I could just live my life like a normal person.
But now, even if somebody developed a medicine to cure autism, I might well choose to stay as I am. Why have I come around to thinking this way?
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.
What’s the reason you jump?
What do you think I’m feeling when I’m jumping up and down clapping my hands? I bet you think I’m not really feeling anything much beyond the manic glee all over my face.
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.
“Seizing up” doesn’t mean that my muscles literally get stiff and immobile—rather, it means that I’m not free to move the way I want. So by jumping up and down, it’s as if I’m shaking loose the ropes that are tying up my body. When I jump, I feel lighter, and I think the reason my body is drawn skyward is that the motion makes me want to change into a bird and fly off to some faraway place.
But constrained both by ourselves and by the people around us, all we can do is tweet-tweet, flap our wings and hop around in a cage. Ah, if only I could just flap my wings and soar away, into the big blue yonder, over the hills and far away!
Why do you memorize train timetables and calendars?
Because it’s fun! We get a real kick out of numbers, us people with autism. Numbers are fixed, unchanging things. The number 1, for example, is only ever, ever the number 1. That simplicity, that clearness, it’s so comforting to us.
Whoever reads any given timetable or calendar, it’s always, always the same. You can easily understand all of them by following the same set of rules. And when it comes to our favorite things, we can memorize these as easily as if they were jumping straight into our heads. Invisible things like human relationships and ambiguous expressions, however, these are difficult for us people with autism to get our heads around.
Perhaps you’re thinking that it’s no major effort for me to write these sentences, but that wouldn’t be true at all. Always lurking at the back of my mind is an anxiety about whether or not I’m perceiving things in the same way that people without autism do. So, via TV, books and just tuning in to the people around me, I’m constantly learning about how ordinary people are supposed to feel in given situations. And whenever I learn something new, I write a short story dealing with the situation in question. This way, with luck, it won’t slip my mind.
What causes panic attacks and meltdowns?
I don’t know if you can understand this one. Panic attacks can be triggered by many things, but even if you set up an ideal environment that gets rid of all the usual causes for a given person, we would still suffer panic attacks now and then.
One of the biggest misunderstandings you have about us is your belief that our feelings aren’t as subtle and complex as yours. Because how we behave can appear so childish in your eyes, you tend to assume that we’re childish on the inside, too. But of course, we experience the same emotions that you do. And because people with autism aren’t skillful talkers, we may in fact be even more sensitive than you are. Stuck here inside these unresponsive bodies of ours, with feelings we can’t properly express, it’s always a struggle just to survive. And it’s this feeling of helplessness that sometimes drives us half crazy, and brings on a panic attack or a meltdown.
When this is happening to us, please just let us cry, or yell, and get it all out. Stay close by and keep a gentle eye on us, and while we’re swept up in our torment, please stop us from hurting ourselves or others.