The Reason I Jump by Naoki Higashida

Author:Naoki Higashida
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2013-07-16T07:00:00+00:00

Q34 DO YOU HAVE A SENSE OF TIME?

Time is a continuous thing with no clear boundaries, which is why it’s so confusing for people with autism. Perhaps you’re puzzled about why time intervals and the speed of time are so hard for us to gauge, and why time seems such slippery stuff for people with autism.

For us, time is as difficult to grasp as picturing a country we’ve never been to. You can’t capture the passing of time on a piece of paper. The hands of a clock may show that some time has passed, but the fact we can’t actually feel it makes us nervous.

Because I have autism, I know all about this and I feel it myself – believe me, this is scary stuff. We’re anxious about what kind of condition we’ll be in at a future point, and what problems we’ll trigger. People who have effortless control over themselves and their bodies never really experience this fear.

For us, one second is infinitely long – yet twenty-four hours can hurtle by in a flash. Time can only be fixed in our memories in the form of visual scenes. For this reason there’s not a lot of difference between one second and twenty-four hours. Exactly what the next moment has in store for us never stops being a big, big worry.

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