On masking. What it is, and what it costs.

Masking is the word we use for the work of pretending to be a non Autistic person.

It is the eye contact you maintain because you learned that people find its absence unsettling. It is the face you arrange into an appropriate expression because your natural one is either too blank or too intense. It is the voice you modulate because your natural cadence is read as rude, or flat, or odd. It is the small talk you rehearse in the shower. It is the way you sit, because someone once told you not to rock. It is the laugh you laugh, on time, at a joke you did not find funny, because the room expected it.