The Inner Voice

The Inner Voice

There’s a short story by Kurt Vonnegut about a future society in which all people are made equal – not created equal, but forced to be equal. Any beautiful person is made to wear a mask. A graceful ballerina wears weights to keep her earthbound. An opera singer must sing in a gravelly tone. Anyone who is exceptional in any way is forcibly “normalized.” No one can be any more attractive or intelligent than anyone else.

None of us would not want to live in that dystopian society. Yet for many people, the world we share is just as judgmental and difficult. For those among us with “syndromes” or “disorders” accepted standards exclude them. What we don’t understand, we label as outside the norm, a problem -- weird.

Naoki Higashida, in his book The Reason I Jump, offers an insider’s view into the world of a person with autism. Naoki wrote this book when he was 13 years old. Unable to communicate his thoughts and feelings verbally, Naoki expressed himself in the way many children with autism do, with repetitive movements, tears and shouts. Eventually he learned to spell out words using a Japanese alphabet grid. His words became sentences, then paragraphs, then this remarkable book in which Naoki explains why he, and many others with autism, do the things they do. He gives us the inside scoop on what it means to live in the world with autism.

         

Naoki begins by answering many of the questions he is asked by his friends and family. Why do you talk so loudly and weirdly? Why do you repeat things? Why do you ask the same question over and over? Why don’t you like to be touched? Why don’t you look at me when I am talking to you? Why do you jump?

His answers are both enlightening and beautiful. He tells us that people like him know that they are not acting in accepted ways. He knows that the things he does can aggravate others. He wants to answer the questions, be understood, love and be loved. He says he often feels “miserable and ashamed that I can’t manage a proper human relationship.”

Yet, while at times he feels “desperately lonely,” he asks us not to give up on him. People like him have much to offer, he reminds us. They should not be shunned or ignored because they are different. He notes that “A person who’s looking at a mountain far away doesn’t notice the patterns of a dandelion right in front of them. A person who’s looking at a dandelion doesn’t see the beauty of a mountain far away.” Some of us see the mountain. Some of us see the dandelion. Both are things of beauty.

Naoki reminds us that “every human being, with or without disabilities, needs to strive to do their best… For us, you see, having autism is normal – so we can’t know for sure what your normal is like. But so long as we learn to love ourselves, I’m not sure how much it matters whether we’re normal or autistic.”

Naoki asserts that many people with autism are “stoic heroes.” The challenges they face trying to fit into the “normal” world might crush many of us. Naoki merely asks us to lighten the load, remove the weights of normality we force on every one, and appreciate the gifts each one of us offers the world.

In one of his short parables, “The White Dove and the Black Crow,” Naoki illustrates this charmingly. The white dove is sad because she cannot find the path to happiness. The black crow tells her that “All paths are one connected path.” In other words, all people travel together on the path to happiness. The white dove flies happily off. The black crow follows looking “no less perfect against the blue sky than the white dove.” Let us see others as “no less perfect.” Let us focus on the path we share.

(Quotations from The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism by Naoki Higashida. Translated by KA Yoshida and David Mitchell)