Autistic people are regularly labelled as rude, evasive or untrustworthy based on this one trait alone, and we very quickly learn that if we want to have a relatively pain-free experience dealing with neurotypicals, we’re going to have to make eye contact some of the time. This energy-draining, majority-pleasing, difficult act is what we call ‘camouflaging’ or, more often, ‘masking’.