Genre: Nonfiction/Biography
Page Count: 125+
Published: 2017 (Penguin Random House)
Potential Triggers: None
Mental Health Topics: Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD; as seen in ASD),
"The Reason I Jump" was a book written by a 13-year-old autistic boy in Japan after learning how to communicate via writing. It's an incredibly powerful book from the perspective of a boy who wants to be heard now that he's gained the ability to speak. This book is written as a series of questions that he's answering with a bunch of illustrative stories interspersed between, ended with a short story of about 20 pages that he wrote to illustrate what life as an autistic is like.
Personally, I thought this was a brilliant and simple look into what it's like to be autistic. My favorite sections were Q13 and Q16, which are about loneliness and being touched respectively. I'll explain why in a moment, but just so that you get an idea of what these questions are, it's a bunch of things that Higashida was asked or he's heard other autistics be asked and he wants to share his view of autism with the world.
Q13 was one of my favorites simply because it captures the fact that we don't like being alone, we just often are alone, and how we seclude ourselves because we're scared of unpredictability and things going wrong.
Q16 was my second favorite because of one particular piece of what he said that I believe captured a lot of what I felt. While Higashida himself stated that he didn't suffer from sensory issues, he mentioned the loss of control that one gets when they're touched. It's the feeling of someone exercising control over you, which isn't generally perceived as pleasant.
Anything else from this lovely book, I guess you'll have to see it for yourself, but I'll leave this off with this: I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to get an inside look into the mind of an autistic. Out of all the books that I've read, Higashida does this the best.