Read The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy With Autism for Free Online Page B

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 LIKE BEING IN THE WATER?
    We just want to go back. To the distant, distant past. To a primeval era, in fact, before human beings even existed. All people with autism feel the same about this one, I reckon. Aquatic life-forms came into being and evolved, but why did they then have to emerge onto dry land, and turn into human beings who chose to lead lives ruled by time? These are real mysteries to me.
    In the water it’s so quiet and I’m so free and happy there. Nobody hassles us in the water, and it’s as if we’ve got all the time in the world. Whether we stay in one place or whether we’re swimming about, when we’re in the water we can really be at one with the pulse of time. Outside of the water there’s always too much stimulation for our eyes and our ears, and it’s impossible for us to guess how long one second is or how long an hour takes.
    People with autism have no freedom. The reason is that we are a different kind of human, born with primeval