 Hey guys, my name's Thomas and I'm autistic. Today I want to talk a little bit about masking, autistic masking. What is it? Well, if you ask lots of different people around the community, you will get varied answers on what people consider to be masking. Typically it's split up into three categories assimilation compensation and masking. That's the whole like social camouflage umbrella. And each of those things have different categories that I hope below down in the description. But for me, masking has been something that wasn't really present when I was younger. I didn't used to do it a lot when I was a team. But when I went into early adulthood, I saw that I wasn't doing as well socially in terms of friendships and relationships as my peers. And I really wanted that at that stage in my life. So I started to mask, I started to copy people online to try and get to this point where I am somebody.