u/AHHHHHWT

This post is not supposed to encourage catfishers, This is just my personal story to get off my shoulder because I can't keep hiding it anymore and the guilt is eating at me.

I've been catfishing this girl I met online, She's from another country and we met through online on discord. I genuinely feel so much love for her, I've grown so attached that I don't want to let go. But the biggest problem is that the version of me she thinks she's talking to isn't even real.

I'm trans (ftm) and still transitioning and since my voice has been getting deeper me and my friends decided to catfish for shits and giggles, We all collected pictures of people who we wanted to catfish as. It was a joke at first, until it wasn't and even my friends are now concerned for my mental well being.

I met my girlfriend through discord and we talked through there, we got along super well and eventually started dating. We've been together 8 months It may not be much to you but to me it is, I've been rotting in depression before I met her and she's made my life so much brighter. But I am not who she thinks I am.

My girlfriend fully believes I am a cis man who just really understands how she feels, but the truth is I'm not even a cis man. Over the months we've been dating I've gotten more and more dysphoric with myself because of this and the fact my girlfriend is transphobic and homophobic doesn't help that either. She's openly admitted she would never date someone who is trans and she's so grateful to be with me, not knowing that I am trans.

It's gotten so bad to the point that my 'catfish persona' has an entire made up life background that isn't real, It's like I made a version of myself that I wish was me. And that's the version of me my girlfriend thinks she's dating. I don't know what to do anymore because even her friends believe It's real and I've even sent a package of plushies and snacks over to her in her country and lied that I had a friend send it so it isn't addressed with my name. She tells me that some day she'll get tickets for me to fly over to her and we can get married, But I know that's never going to happen no matter how much I want to marry her too.

Everything that happens in my life is being put into this fake persona I made up online. My experiences are not even my own experiences anymore, they are my persona's experiences, When I talk to my girlfriend, It's not me talking to her, It's my persona. It's driving me deeper into depression than I already am. I feel so guilty, I love her I really do, If I could come back to her as the real me I would. But how would she react to the fact that the real me is so vastly different to the me she thought she was dating. I don't know, I don't even think words can express how I feel, I want to date her as the real me and not the version of myself I made up.

I'm so so tired of trying to keep up this catfish persona and I just wanna be able to be the real me and still love her. It's become an addiction for me to keep this whole act going. I tell myself "One day, I'll tell her" but the next day I find myself lying to her about how I dyed my hair and show her a picture of who she thinks is me with red dyed hair when the reality is behind my screen I still have the same black hair I always do, I lie and I lie. I've created an entirely new person that only exists online and if she dug deep enough I'm sure she's going to find out one day the man she's talking to isn't even real.

I know what I'm doing is wrong but I can't stop it, I don't even know where to begin to stop it. I desperately want to tell her the truth, that I've been lying to her the entire time, but I can't bring myself to do it. The guilt of what I'm doing is eating me alive and I don't think I can tell this to my therapist either. I just wish that sometimes if I were born a man and had met her as a cis man we'd actually be able to get married one day, but sometimes I also wish we had never met so that she won't have to deal with the pain and loneliness when I eventually have to leave her.

(Edit: Since I've made this post I've gotten so many useful and uplifting comments from everybody who has given me advice on what I should do, I am planning to come clean to my girlfriend and figuring out on how I should go about it. The longer that I let it keep being like this, the more I get attached and the more it will hurt, It hurts to face it but she deserves someone who will be honest and open to her, while I need to work on myself to become more truthful about my identity, embrace the real me and take pride in myself as a trans ftm. I hope that I'll eventually be able to find somebody who will love me for who I am. In the end I can't keep lying to her like this and will come clean to all the lies, Thank you so so much to all the helpful comments I'm very grateful for all the help. :)