For a long time, 33-year-old Marlies Hübner couldn’t understand why she was constantly having difficult conversations with people—often offending loved ones without intending to. Frustrated, she decided to search for an answer. In her mid 20s, after several meetings with specialists, she was finally diagnosed with autism.
In the UK, around 700,000 people are on the autism spectrum, with the condition affecting just over 1 percent of the global population. Though Hübner says it’s always been difficult to know exactly where she falls on the spectrum, she hopes the personal experiences she lays out in her new memoir, Verstörungstheorien (Conspiracy Theories) will help a wide range of autistic people deal with their condition.
After Hübner explained to VICE that phone calls can be incredibly frustrating experiences for her —”who says what when?” “how should I deal with pauses?”—we spoke via email to find out a bit more about autism, and how the condition has affected her specifically.
Read more at: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/kzz74x/ten-questions-you-always-wanted-to-ask-a-person-with-autism
