Natasha Nelson, a 35-year old entrepreneur in Stone Mountain, in the US state of Georgia, does not have an innate sense of social norms. She did not know why people meeting for the first time would choose to engage in small talk instead of deep conversations, or why people like to make their beds.
“If your life has always felt like it was in chaos and you don’t feel comfortable and you don’t feel like you thrive and you just feel like you’re constantly surviving and going from one thing to the next, what [have] you got to lose?” Nelson says, encouraging such people to seek a diagnosis.
Common signs of autism include trouble with social communication and a fixation on certain routines or topics – Nelson says “people have become my special interest now” – and may go unnoticed during childhood.
But it can be costly and difficult to obtain an autism diagnosis later in life due to a shortage of medical professionals trained to work specifically with adults.