is an excellent book by Naoki Higashida, subtitled One boy's voice from the silence of autism (isbn 978-1-4447-7677-5).
As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:
The Reason I Jump unwittingly discredits the doomiest idea of received wisdom about autism - that people with autism are anti-social loners who lack empathy with others. (Foreword)
I very quickly forget what it is I've just heard. Inside my head there really isn't such a big difference between what I was told just now, and what I heard a long, long time ago.
What makes us smile from the inside is seeing something beautiful, or a memory that makes us laugh. This generally happens when there's nobody watching us. And at night, on our own, we might burst out laughing underneath the duvet.
When I see I've made a mistake, my mind shuts down. However tiny the mistake, for me, it's a massive deal. Once I've made a mistake, the fact of it starts rushing towards me like a tsunami. And then, like trees or houses being destroyed by the tsunami, I get destroyed by the shock.
There are times when I can't act, even though I really, badly want to. This is when my body is beyond my control.
When I'm jumping, I can feel my body parts really well... and that makes me feel so, so good. 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.
It's not quite that the noises grate on our nerves. It's more to do with a fear that if we keep listening, we'll lose all sense of where we are.
My guess is that the despair we're feeling has nowhere to go and fills up our entire bodies, makes our senses more and more confused.
When you see and object, it seems that you see it as an entire thing first, and only afterwards do its details follow on. But for people with autism, the details jump straight out at us first of all, and then only gradually, detail by detail, does the whole image sort of float up into focus.
Numbers are fixed, unchanging things. That simplicity, that clearness, it's so comforting to us. Invisible things like human relationships and ambiguous expressions, however, these are difficult for us people with autism to get our heads around.
I understand that any plan is only a plan, and is never definite, but I just cannot take it when a fixed arrangement doesn't proceed as per the visual schedule. Visual schedules create such a strong impression on us that if a change occurs, we get flustered and panicky.
We can put up with our own hardships okay, but the thought that our lives are the source of other people's unhappiness, that's plain unbearable.
