The Reason I Jump
The reason I read is to see words and the world in surprising ways. And The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism astonishes. “Autism literature” is an industry unto itself (with 30,000+ titles on Amazon), and not one I was necessarily curious about. I came upon Reason by chance. By the time I finished it 75 minutes later, my body, my world—and the way I viewed both—had changed somehow.
The book takes the form of questions, (“Why do people with autism talk so loudly and weirdly?” “Why do you line up your toy cars and blocks?”), with the 13-year-old, autistic Naoki Higashida using an alphabet grid to painstakingly construct the answers he could not speak out loud.
Think the caregiver’s task is herculean? Imagine struggling to simulate “normalcy” when you can’t communicate or understand language. When—unable to control your sensory input—you’re assaulted by everything that can be touched, smelled and heard around you all at once. When you can’t distinguish minutes from hours… while feeling like the room is tilting. Then imagine writing on top of it. Amazingly, Naoki does it with honesty, empathy and not a hint of self-pity
For researchers who need to treat children as more than a walking set of conditions, this book should be game changing. For families, life changing. In his introduction, bestselling novelist David Mitchell writes that Naoki’s words allowed him to understand his autistic child’s mind for the first time: “It is no exaggeration to say that The Reason I Jump allowed me to round a corner in our relationship.”
“The truth is, we’d love to be with other people. But because things never go right, we get used to being alone.”
It’s hard to get angry at a kid who’s talking in a loud or weird voice once you understand it can’t be controlled—and that trying to do so actually feels like they’re being strangled. Some of the book’s concepts were harder for me to understand—so foreign were they to my own experience. And as I reread them a 2nd or 3rd time, I was struck by the strange poetry in those moments. The insight and clarity of a 13-year-old autistic boy; and me the one unmoored.
A popular saying in the blogosphere
There’s a popular saying: “While we try to teach our children about life, our children teach us what life is all about.” Naoki’s lessons are not just in how he contends with the world… but also how he appreciates it. He marvels at laughter. He loses himself in nature. And the reason he jumps? “When I’m jumping, it’s as if my feelings are going upward to the sky.”
Intent on making the autistic mind a less mysterious place, Naoki’s book invites readers to “have a nice trip through [his] world.” I never expected that the journey through my own world would feel so different once I finished it.
Author Naoki Higashida