Autism

Watching what you say and what you do isn't masking. Watching what you are is masking. You don't just filter out, you have to emote entire emotions that you'd express entirely differently because other people are disturbed by your normal expression of XYZ feeling.

It comes from years of being double punished when something bad happens because our remorse facial expression doesn't match what they think remorse is supposed to look like so they don't see any. And sometimes those.punishments are just for expressing something else in the non standard way.

I mean sure filtering topics is part of it, and it often involves filtering very pertinent topics. For example if something is really bothering you to the point of physical pain, but it isn't supposed to be bothering you, that is the topic you then have to filter. And you have to physically replace your expressions of pain with whatever emotion you are supposed to be feeling. Of course you don't replace your pain with the way youd express the emotion you're supposed to be feeling. You replace the pain with how they wish you'd express the emotion they wish you'd be feeling.

Masking is gaslighting your entire body and brain out of every big and small action and reaction until whoever it is you really are is difficult to even retrieve.

The thing is the degree to which you have to mask. Human communication is full of aspects that are interpreted, performed and learned in an instinctive way, such as how often you should be looking at someone in the eyes, for how long, which expression should you have while doing so, and so on, just to pick a very narrow category.

Because the brains of people in the spectrum have some differences, the "correct" instinctive way of doing those things is almost usually different, some people whose brains think that isn't the correct way of performing non-verbal communication will react negatively, sometimes without being capable of explaining why, and will instead retort to vague attacks such as "XYZ is such a weirdo/gives me bad vibes/is a creep", even when they aren't really doing anything wrong.

You may have heard or read of the "doesn't make eye-to-eye contact" pointer to diagnose autism. That is true of a subset of autistic people, there are other autistic people whose natural prefered amount of eye contact is different than the norm, and there are plenty who perform the socially acceptable amount of eye contact because they're masking, even though it feels unnatural, or feels annoying, or forced, or is even energy-consuming. Now consider the same for voice tone, sarcasm, gender roles in communication, hand gestures (depending on the country), how much it is socially acceptable to discuss your interests specifically, and so on, and so on, which are often also rules that aren't laid out with precision, because NTs don't need them to be laid out with precision. There's a dual problem in that you're both constantly forcing yourself to perform in a way that feels unnatural, and that you have to consciously seek out for signs that they're being interpreted the correct way, because otherwise NTs aren't going to tell you, and all of that is taking energy out of you.

As personal anecdotes. I didn't know how to mask in my early teens, and consequently, I was often left out at best, when not mocked or ridiculed, in physical social settings, while online I had no issues whatsoever to make friends even though I was annoyingly smug (people will be far more willing to overlook your bad traits if you're capable of correctly performing that you're part of the in-group). Nowadays, if I'm in a place far away from my birth region, I don't have to mask too much because people will usually assume that my "weird" traits are just a cultural thing.

I guess masking to some degree is normal. Everybody plays a role all the time. It's just how much your role deviates from your "true self"that varies.

Usually and hopefully you can be closer to yourself among friends than when dealing with colleagues or customers in professional settings.

But I'm guessing as well, I'm also not sure if there's a bigger difference in meaning to this community here.