Yet for those people born onto the autistic spectrum, this unedited, unfiltered and scary-as-all-hell reality is home. The functions which genetics bestow on the rest of us – the ‘editors’ – as a birthright, people with autism must spend their lives learning how to simulate. It is an intellectual and emotional task of Herculean, Sisyphean and Titanic proportions, and if the people with autism who undertake it aren’t heroes, then I don’t know what heroism is, never mind that the heroes have no choice.
— A foreword to the ‘The Reason I Jump’ (Naoki Higashida)