 going to refer to masking as the act of changing one's outward behavior, one's outward appearance, in order to fit in to certain social groups or situations. For example, you can mask at work, you can mask in a relationship, you can mask on your own, well maybe not on your own, but you can mask in a lot of different areas of life in order to fit a certain social expectation. Autistic masking, for all intents and purposes, is the act of hiding your autism from the world, from other people. The issue is, for a lot of autistic people, is that we do it all the time. With our mum, with our teacher, with our friends, with our partner, we tend to mask because we don't feel like anyone can really love or like us because we are autistic. Very horrible, difficult thing.