If you care to listen, then go right ahead:
I have been catfishing people, pretending to be someone I am not, and I have reached a point where I can no longer deny the consequences of my actions.
What began as an escape has become something I struggle to separate from my own feelings. I have grown attached to people I have deceived. I have fallen in love with people who believe they know me, when in truth, they have only known the person I have allowed them to see.
And I find myself asking: if I am to bear this pain alone for so long, then why can I not tell myself a little lie to share it with somebody without my own identity?
I have used my loneliness to justify my dishonesty, convincing myself that if my affection is genuine, then perhaps my deception is not so terrible. But I know that sincerity does not erase the wrong I have done.
For how can I claim to love someone while denying them the truth they deserve? How can I ask them to stay when I have never given them the opportunity to decide whether they would stay for the real me?
And yet, I fear the truth. Not because I do not understand its importance, but because I understand what it might cost me.
Perhaps that is the cruelest contradiction of all: I seek love because I feel unworthy of it, and then I conceal myself because I fear that being known will prove me right.
I cannot claim that my suffering makes me innocent. I can only admit that I have allowed my desire to be loved to become greater than my responsibility to those who love me.
And I must ask myself whether I truly wish to be loved, or whether I have simply become too afraid to discover if I could be loved as myself.