oh you mean masking as in being sanitary not masking as in presenting as allistic
@Lady Masking as in turning sections of an image overlay invisible.
Hot Masking Take
@Lady Masking as in holding back a part of your self (/your acts-of-existence. I mean those two synonymously) that would otherwise unavoidably interact with others, and affect those others by virtue of having been interacted with.
1 and 2 and... okay only 3 if you are a sentient bitmap and reality is the resulting image, which is a situation I have yet to encounter.
re: Hot Masking Take
@Lady (Obviously I do not think both of those actions, or both of those expectations-for-others-to-take-those-actions, are morally equivalent.
But I do think they have this structural commonality, which lines up with the generic phrase "masking" that they share.)
re: Hot Masking Take
@Lady The naive answer would be to go for "autistic masking as learned self-defense against visibility/bigotry" but that's actually just "put on the mask because people get uncomfortable/upset if you don't mask", and so is still about the effect that your masking-or-not has on other people.
So instead I'll say that I think maybe masking, as a construction of a front to face people with, is a layer between the outside social world and the less-deliberarely-constructed self, which can maybe keep particularly emotionally-intense/-threatening interactions from having as strong an impact. (By analogy, think about how it's easier to shrug off insults or emotional manipulation in languages you don't speak, or in nonfluent second languages you can stop mentally translating.)
By the same mechanism, it can be harder to smell the emotional roses. (or. well. sense people producing pleasant aromas at you. I think the metaphor is struggling a bit here.)
... maybe.