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

It’s thanks to this belief that those of us with autism get even more locked up inside ourselves.
    Just because some of us can make sounds or utter words, it doesn’t follow automatically that what we’ve said is really what we wanted to say. Even with straightforward ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ questions, we make mistakes. It happens all the time to me that the other person misunderstands or misinterprets what I’ve just said.
    Because I’m barely able to hold a conversation, fixing what’s gone wrong is beyond my powers. Every time this happens, I end up hating myself for being so useless and clamming up. Please don’t assume that every single word we say is what we intended. This makes communication between us difficult, I know – we can’t even use gestures – but we really badly want you to understand what’s going on inside our hearts and minds. And basically, my feelings are pretty much the same as yours.

Q10 W HY CAN’T YOU HAVE A PROPER CONVERSATION?
    For a long time I’ve been wondering why us people with autism can’t talk properly. I can never say what I really want to. Instead, verbal junk that hasn’t got anything to do with anything comes pouring out of my mouth. This used to get me down badly, and I couldn’t help envying all those people who speak without even trying. Our feelings are the same as everyone else’s, but we can’t find a way to express them.
    We don’t even have proper control over our own bodies. Both staying still and moving when we’re told to is tricky – it’s as if we’re remote-controlling a faulty robot. On top of this, we’re always getting told off, and we can’t even explain ourselves. I used to feel abandoned by the whole world.
    Please don’t judge us from the outside only. I don’t know why we can’t talk properly. But it’s not that we won’t talk – it’s that we can’t talk and we’re suffering because of it. All on our own, there’s nothing we can do about this problem, and there were times when I used to wonder why Non-Speaking Me had ever been born. But having started with text communication, now I’m able to express myself via the alphabet grid and a computer, and being able to share what I think allows me to understand that I, too, exist in this world as a human being.
    Can you imagine how your life would be if you couldn’t talk?

T HE MYSTERY OF THE MISSING WORDS
    Us kids with autism, we never use enough words, and it’s these missing words that can cause all the trouble. In this example, three friends are talking about their classmate who has autism:
    ‘Hey, she just said, “All of us”!’
    ‘So … that must mean she wants to join in with us, yeah?’
    ‘Dunno. Maybe she wants to know if we’re all doing it.’
     
    In fact, the autistic girl’s ‘all of us’ came from something the teacher had said earlier on in the day: ‘Tomorrow, all of us are going to the park.’ What the girl wanted to find out was
when
they were going. She tried to do this by repeating the only words she could use, ‘all of us’. Here you can see how our missing words tweak your imaginations and send you off on wild-goose chases, here, there and everywhere.
    Honestly, what a mysterious language us kids with autism speak!

Q11 W HY DON’T YOU MAKE EYE CONTACT WHEN YOU’RE TALKING?
    True, we don’t look at people’s eyes very much. ‘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 it is you’re seeing, it’s the same as not seeing anything at all.
    What’s bothered me for a long time is this idea people have, that so long as we’re keeping eye contact while they’re talking to us, that alone means we’re taking in every word. Ha! If only that was all it took, my disability would have been cured a long, long time ago …

Q12 Y OU SEEM TO DISLIKE HOLDING HANDS WITH PEOPLE.
    It’s not that we