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

when we look at nature, we receive a sort of permission to be alive in this world, and our entire bodies get recharged. However often we’re ignored and pushed away by other people, nature will always give us a good big hug, here inside our hearts.
    The greenness of nature is the lives of plants and trees. Green is life. And that’s the reason we love to go out for walks.

Q46 D O YOU ENJOY YOUR FREE TIME?
    So what do
you
do in your free time? Because for people with autism, free time is in fact un-free time. ‘You can do whatever you feel like doing, now,’ someone might tell us. But actually, it’s pretty hard for us to find something we do feel like doing, not just like that. If we happen to see some toys or books we’re always playing with or reading, then sure, we’ll pick them up. Thing is, however, that’s not so much what we
want
to do as something we
can
do. Playing with familiar items is comforting because we already know what to do with them, so then, of course, people watching us assume,
Aha, so that’s what he likes to do in his free time
… What I really want to do, however, is to get stuck into some difficult book or to debate some issue or other.
    We are misunderstood, and we’d give anything if only we could be understood properly. People with autism would be suffering breakdowns over this – all the time – if we weren’t holding ourselves in so tightly. Please, understand what we really are, and what we’re going through.

Q47 W OULD YOU GIVE US AN EXAMPLE OF SOMETHING PEOPLE WITH AUTISM REALLY ENJOY?
    We do take pleasure in one thing that you probably won’t be able to guess. Namely, making friends with nature. The reason we aren’t much good at people skills is that we think too much about what sort of impression we’re making on the other person, or how we should be responding to this or that. But nature is always there at hand to wrap us up, gently: glowing, swaying, bubbling, rustling.
    Just by looking at nature, I feel as if I’m being swallowed up into it, and in that moment I get the sensation that my body’s now a speck, a speck from long before I was born, a speck that is melting into nature herself. This sensation is so amazing that I forget that I’m a human being, and one with special needs to boot.
    Nature calms me down when I’m furious, and laughs with me when I’m happy. You might think that it’s not possible that nature could be a friend, not really. But human beings are part of the animal kingdom too, and perhaps us people with autism still have some left-over awareness of this, buried somewhere deep down. I’ll always cherish the part of me that thinks of nature as a friend.

T HE GREAT STATUE OF BUDDHA
    When you’ve been on a trip somewhere, have you ever watched someone burst into tears for no obvious reason? Of course there
is
a reason for it, really, it’s just that the person who’s crying isn’t able to tell you what the reason is. For all you know, the person might be crying for joy, but that might not even occur to you.
    Well, it’s much the same for me. The other day I was visiting a town called Kamakura, where there’s this huge statue of Buddha. And when I saw it, I was so deeply moved that I started welling up. It wasn’t just Buddha’s majesty and dignity, it was the sheer weight of history and generations of people’s hopes, prayers and thoughts that broke over me, and I couldn’t stop myself crying. It was as if Buddha himself was saying to me, ‘All human beings have their hardships to bear, so never swerve away from the path you’re on.’
    Everybody has a heart that can be touched by something. Crying isn’t necessarily about sadness or meltdowns or being upset. I’d like you to bear that in mind, if you would.

Q48 W HY ARE YOU ALWAYS RUNNING OFF SOMEWHERE?
    My mind is forever swaying, this way and that. It’s not that I want to go running off, I just can’t help dashing away to whatever place enters my line of sight. It’s really annoying for me too, because people are always telling me off about it. But I don’t know how to stop it.
    So I’m not doing all this moving around because it pleases me – it isn’t even all that calming. It’s like being teleported from one place to another without knowing it’s happening. Even if someone tries to prevent me, or if something else gets in the way, it happens anyway. I sort of lose myself for a little while.
    So what’s my master-plan to fix this problem? I’m