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

of time are so hard for us to gauge, and why time seems such slippery stuff for people with autism.
    For us, time is as difficult to grasp as picturing a country we’ve never been to. You can’t capture the passing of time on a piece of paper. The hands of a clock may show that some time has passed, but the fact we can’t actually
feel
it makes us nervous.
    Because I have autism, I know all about this and I feel it myself – believe me, this is scary stuff. We’re anxious about what kind of condition we’ll be in at a future point, and what problems we’ll trigger. People who have effortless control over themselves and their bodies never really experience this fear.
    For us, one second is infinitely long – yet twenty-four hours can hurtle by in a flash. Time can only be fixed in our memories in the form of visual scenes. For this reason there’s not a lot of difference between one second and twenty-four hours. Exactly what the next moment has in store for us never stops being a big, big worry.



Q35 W HY ARE YOUR SLEEP PATTERNS ALL MESSED UP?
    Quite a few people with autism find it hard to fall asleep at night. When I was little there were times when I couldn’t fall asleep either, even when it got really late. This seems strange, because we human beings aren’t nocturnal animals, right? But now I rarely have this problem. The cure might simply be time. People who can’t sleep may appear to be okay on the outside, while inside they’re exhausted.
    I don’t really know what causes sleeping disorders, so all I want to ask you to do here is, if your autistic child isn’t going to sleep at a decent hour, please don’t tell them off – even if it goes on night after night after night.

N EVER-ENDING SUMMER
    People with autism can be restless and fidgety all the time, almost to the point of it looking comical. It’s as if it’s the summer for us the whole year round. Most people look pretty relaxed when they’re not doing anything in particular, but we’re always zooming off madly like a kid who’s late for school. We’re like cicadas who’ll miss the summer unless we hurry, hurry, hurry.
Bzzzzzz, bzzzzzz, crick-crick, crick-crick, chirrrrrr
… We cry our hearts out, shout our heads off, and never rest in our battle against time.
    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 semi-detached from the flow of time, we are always uneasy from sunrise to sunset. Just like the cicadas, we cry out, we call out.

Q36 W HY DO YOU LIKE SPINNING?
    Us people with autism often enjoy spinning ourselves round and around. We like spinning whatever object comes to hand, for that matter. Can you understand what’s so much fun about spinning?
    Everyday scenery doesn’t rotate, so things that do spin simply fascinate us. Just watching spinning things fills us with a sort of everlasting bliss – for the time we sit watching them, they rotate with perfect regularity. Whatever object we spin, this is always true. Unchanging things are comforting, and there’s something beautiful about that.

Q37 W HY DO YOU FLAP YOUR FINGERS AND HANDS IN FRONT OF YOUR FACE?
    Flapping our fingers and hands in front of our faces allows the light to enter our eyes in a pleasant, filtered fashion. Light that reaches us like this feels soft and gentle, like moonlight. But ‘unfiltered’ direct light sort of ‘needles’ its way into the eyeballs of people with autism in sharp straight lines, so we see too many points of light. This actually makes our eyes hurt.
    This said, we couldn’t get by without light. Light wipes away our tears, and when we’re bathed in light, we’re happy. Perhaps we just love how its particles pour down on us. Light particles somehow console us. I admit this is something I can’t quite explain using logic.

Q38 W HY DO YOU LINE UP YOUR TOY CARS AND BLOCKS?
    Lining things up is the best fun. Watching running water is great fun, too. Other kids seem to enjoy games about pretending and make-believe, but as a person with autism I never really see the point of them.
    What I care about – in fact I’m pretty obsessive about this – is the order things come in, and different ways of lining them up. It’s actually the lines and the surfaces of things like jigsaw puzzles that we love, and things like that. When we’re playing in this way, our brains feel refreshed and clear.

Q39 W HY DO YOU