Please don’t give up on us

“Please don’t give up on us” is a recurring appeal in The Reason I Jump, where Naoki Higashida connects continued support with the possibility of being understood. The phrase answers familiar misreadings of autistic behavior: what looks like defiance may not be deliberate, what sounds like speech may not carry the intended message, and an inability to act may persist even after repeated instruction. Its force comes from the gap between what observers think they see and the distress Naoki describes from within.

Meaning and Context

The appeal first emerges in an account of repeating actions after being told not to. Naoki says that autistic children are often reprimanded for doing the same things again, though they are not acting out of naughtiness. When the reprimand happens, they feel terrible about having done wrong; but by the next opportunity they have largely forgotten the previous warning and may be carried away into repeating the behavior. He describes the impulse as feeling as though something other than the self is urging it on. The repetition is therefore not presented as proof that correction has been understood and deliberately rejected. It is a painful cycle in which remorse and recurrence coexist.

That cycle also shapes the request’s emotional urgency. Naoki anticipates the observer’s frustration at seeing the same behavior return and acknowledges that autistic people know they are making others sad or upset. Yet knowing this does not necessarily give them control over what happens next. The plea not to give up follows from this mismatch: the person may care about the effect on others and still be unable to prevent the action. Understanding the difficulty does not erase its consequences, but it changes what those consequences mean about intention and what kind of response may help.

Communication and Misinterpretation

The phrase extends beyond repeated behavior to the problem of being heard accurately. Naoki distinguishes producing sounds from communicating what one wants to say. A person may utter words without those words matching the intended message, and even straightforward yes-or-no answers can be mistaken or misinterpreted. If observers treat speech itself as conclusive proof that the speaker has conveyed a clear intention, the autistic person can become more deeply locked inside a misunderstanding. The appeal for continued support therefore includes patience with expression that is incomplete, delayed, or unreliable in ways that may not be visible to a listener.

Attention, too, can be misread. Naoki explains that failing to notice someone speaking is not the same as deliberately ignoring them, although others may take it as arrogance or intellectual incapacity. People around him prompt him to return a greeting; he may repeat the words he has been told to say, while feeling guilty toward the person he did not acknowledge and miserable that he cannot manage what others regard as a proper human relationship. The difficulty is not simply that others lack information about him: their interpretation can turn an access problem into a judgment of character, while leaving him unable to explain or apologize.

Naoki offers a practical alternative to that mistaken attribution: say the autistic person’s name before beginning to speak, so that attention can be secured first. This small adjustment matters within the larger argument because it changes the interaction instead of demanding that the person silently overcome a difficulty. The book repeatedly asks caregivers to distinguish apparent refusal from what a person can actually perceive and do. The appeal is not a request to ignore the autistic person’s actions; it is a request to approach them with enough care to find out what those actions do and do not communicate.

Support, Learning, and Action

In another passage, Naoki describes how difficult it can be to carry out a task without the right cue. Knowing what comes next does not mean being able to begin it independently: the next action may remain unavailable until the brain receives a prompt. Acting without it can be terrifying, like crossing only when a signal changes. The comparison makes dependence on cues legible as a condition of action rather than a preference for being managed. What may look like needless waiting can be experienced as being unable to switch on the next step.

Naoki does allow for change. Once the frightening phase has passed, a person may gradually become used to acting without the prompt. But he stresses that reaching this point cannot be accomplished alone. The attempts can involve crying, screaming, hitting out, or breaking things, and he asks caregivers to keep struggling alongside the autistic person rather than withdraw support at the moment of greatest upheaval. The appeal is thus tied to an account of development: assistance is not necessarily the opposite of learning independence; sustained help can make a new action possible over time.

He gives a related explanation for why demonstration alone may not suffice. From the outside, it can be hard to tell whether a person has understood, and even after being shown how to do something many times, the person may still be unable to do it. Naoki does not present this as a lack of desire to try: autistic children, he says, want to do the best they can, but do not always know how to get things done by themselves in the same way others do. When caregivers conclude that further help is pointless, their withdrawal brings misery. The request to continue is therefore both relational and practical: stay present through the difficulty, because wanting to succeed does not guarantee access to the means of doing so.

Distress, Value, and the Reader

The stakes of the appeal become most severe in Naoki’s account of misery. He says that people looking after autistic children may describe the work as hard, while failing to grasp how miserable the children themselves feel when they are always causing problems and seem useless at nearly everything they try. When they do something wrong, they may be told off or laughed at, yet be unable to apologize. The sequence can become self-hatred and despair repeated again and again. In this context, giving up is not merely a reduction in practical assistance: it can deepen a person’s sense that their life has no value.

Naoki also reverses the expected focus of care. He asks those who spend the day with autistic people not to become overwhelmed on their account, because visible caregiver stress can feel like a denial that the autistic person’s life has any worth. The hardest ordeal, he says, is the thought of causing grief to other people. Personal hardship may be bearable; believing that one’s existence is the source of others’ unhappiness is not. The request for perseverance therefore attends to both sides of the relationship, while insisting that a caregiver’s strain must not become proof, in the autistic person’s mind, that they are a burden without value.

This appeal gains force from the book’s broader insistence that a seemingly helpless autistic body can contain a curious, subtle, complex mind. Naoki’s writing offers carers a route beyond judgments based on visible behavior or fluent speech, and the introduction describes the restoration of faith in the person being cared for as one of its gifts. The request is not an abstract reassurance detached from daily life: it is grounded in scenes of missed cues, repeated mistakes, shame, and actions that cannot be initiated on demand. To continue helping is to take seriously the possibility that the person is trying to communicate and act, even when the usual signs of intention are difficult to read.

A Story’s Invitation

The plea also frames the book’s embedded story, “I’m Right Here.” Naoki says that he wrote the story in the hope that it would help readers understand the pain of being unable to express oneself to loved ones. He connects that understanding with the possibility of connecting back to the hearts of autistic people. The title’s insistence on presence speaks to the same divide that runs through the questions and answers: a person can be physically there, with an inner life and a wish to reach others, while remaining difficult for those around them to recognize.

Across these contexts, “Please don’t give up on us” is at once a request for endurance and a challenge to interpretation. It asks readers not to confuse repetition with naughtiness, difficulty responding with lack of understanding, or dependence on support with lack of desire. Just as importantly, it does not promise that patience will immediately resolve every difficulty. Instead, the phrase asks for help to continue through the interval between an autistic person’s intention and their ability to make that intention visible—a space in which premature judgment can deepen isolation, but sustained attention can keep communication and learning possible.