When Charlotte’s autistic friend suggested to her that she too could be on the spectrum, she laughed it off at first. “I completely thought she was mad,” she says now, a year after her diagnosis at the age of 30. “I thought that I can’t be autistic, I really care about people. It’s really embarrassing to even say this now because it’s such a mistaken idea.
“People don’t really imagine autistic adults, it’s usually a child, it’s usually a male child. I just didn’t identify with any of that.”
As a child, Charlotte was always seen as eccentric and living in her own world, but no one inquired about it. Her brother, who has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), drew more attention because adults wanted
