AIBU to struggle with having to hide my genuine opinions about colleagues at work?

[YourWaryPlumBalonz]

I'm autistic and one thing I find particularly difficult about working life is the tension between being my authentic self and having to maintain positive relationships with people I genuinely dislike or have very little in common with.
I understand that nobody is going to like everyone they work with, but I find the expectation to be consistently friendly, diplomatic and tactful quite exhausting.
For example, I work with a woman who is the same rank as me. She's very particular about cleanliness and regularly comments on how messy my desk is, which I find irritating because she's not my manager. She also enjoys talking about expensive designer handbags, whereas I'm not interested in fashion or luxury goods and find those conversations rather materialistic.
We have very different personalities, interests and values, and I wouldn't choose to spend time with her outside work.
My main difficulty isn't simply that I dislike her. It's that I feel unable to express my genuine opinions without suffering social or professional consequences.
I know I can't just tell someone to get lost or say that I find them irritating without damaging the working relationship. But constantly filtering my thoughts and pretending to be interested feels dishonest and exhausting.
I sometimes wonder why we place so much importance on politeness when people may secretly dislike one another anyway. Wouldn't it be easier if people could just acknowledge that they don't particularly like each other and maintain a purely professional relationship?
I'm not suggesting people should be deliberately cruel, but I struggle to understand where the line is between reasonable social courtesy and pretending to be someone you're not.
My questions are:

1. How do you work alongside people you genuinely dislike without feeling you're constantly pretending?
2. Is it acceptable to be polite but emotionally distant, rather than friendly?
3. How do you set boundaries with colleagues who irritate you without creating conflict?
4. How do other autistic people cope with the expectation to filter their genuine opinions at work?
5. How do you distinguish between being authentic and being unnecessarily blunt?

AIBU to find this aspect of working life so frustrating? And what practical strategies would you recommend?

Agreed. That happened to me when I was in my 20s. One of the senior team members gave me totally wrong info when I asked him something and I followed his instructions. A day or so later I was reprimanded by the team leader so I told her what he'd said. I don't know why he did it: we'd always got on okay, or so it seemed to me, and he was seen as a genial person. But there's no way he didn't know what he was doing.

a lot of us struggled though life and got diagnosed mid-50's... we have in no way been mollycoddled and its a wonder some of us arent dead.

I thought of a quote from the film, When Harry Met Sally, Sally says to Harry, "You're going to have to find a way of not expressing every feeling that you have, every moment that you have them." It's kind of the way civilised society operates.

I said "a lot" not "all".

You don't have to be friends, or pretend to care about handbags.
Just do your work, keep it polite but distant.
If you desk mess is impacting others (smells, crumbs, things falling off) fix your shit, otherwise ignore her.

Being long retired I have no idea when this term, 'authentic self' was dreamt up. Surely we all have more than one 'authentic self', the person seen at work, the person seen by the Immediate family, the person seen by the wider family etc are not necessarily the same self. For example, how often do parents say on Parents' Evenings 's/he's not like that at home' because the child is different in different environments, the environment sometimes determines which self is seen. Just sounds like a load of psycho-babble one hears on a course!

Im so sick of the "authentic self" stuff, its self absorbed nauseating claptrap.

Stop having a desk like a hamster, learn to mask your feelings like every other adult in the workplace, and figure out that as much as you love your authentic self - nobody you work with cares, they just want you to do your job and nod along to small talk without starting a riot every time you discover an unshared value because those are the socal rules.

So did I.....

This. It doesn't need any drama.

You know full well why you replied to me directly instead of just adding your own comment to the OP. You did it to 'contradict' me. But you didn't contradict me because I never claimed my statement applied to all ND people.

Everyone "masks", it's not just a ND thing.

I agree. However, some people only have to mask specific things and this is less exhausting than having to mask ADHD. For example, if your brain is splintering off in different directions and you experience the urge to make comments at 100mph on 20 different topics and want to circle back to all of them and get every thought out that you're thinking.. it's incredibly tiring to slow it down, pick a thread, resist all impulses, speak at your friend's pace, match their enthusiasm/wavelength, all while trying not to be too 'weird' with comments you have to manually select from your brain, because you don't have a natural filter to do that for you.. as opposed to say.. just masking that you don't like someone in a friendship group to keep the peace. People with ADHD have to do that too on top of everything else.