 Masking is hiding autistic traits as well as monitoring and changing your body language to reach a desired outcome, usually to fit in, usually to be perceived in a positive light. It's weird talking about masking because in a sense it does come across as being fake, as being manipulative in some way. But a lot of the times masking is done to compensate for some level of difference that we may have. Maybe in terms of the medical context, we might think, oh, they're compensating for the social deficits that they might have within the context of a normal social situation, which kind of makes sense. It's not necessarily done in a very hurtful kind of manipulative way so that you can like hide from people and make sure that you craft how you look to people in a very false way for personal gain. It can be sort of seen by that, but a lot of the time it is done out of necessity, especially during childhood.