Most people have never heard the word masking, and almost everyone is doing some version of it. Masking is what it sounds like. It is the work of hiding the real you to pass as whatever the room expects. For a person who lives with autism, it can look like forcing eye contact that actually hurts, swallowing a stim that would have brought relief, scripting a conversation in advance, copying other people's faces and tones, and holding all of it together until you finally get to
