Confessions of an Ex Catfish [long post]

I am F, 25, a college student, and I've been catfishing people on the internet since I was 15 years old. I was in catholic school at the time, and was raised by crazy strict Jesus freak parents. I had no friends and I wasn't allowed to date, which left me pretty lonely in my early years. I got the idea to start catfishing when I was 15, ironically after we had a seminar on the dangers of the internet. Catfishing was one of the things discussed, and something in me was fascinated with the idea of becoming another person entirely. That night I looked for pictures on Reddit, ones that posted regularly on r/selfie so I could have a backlog of images to send for any occasion. I spent a few hours flipping and retouching the images with filters (so they couldn't be found with Google Image Search), made a bunch of fake emails, and I created a solid persona. I created a fake name, fake personality, a fake family - I wanted everything to be "natural" and I didn't want to make details that I would forget later on. Then the catfishing began. The first guy was 19 years old, a somewhat sporty dude with a pet pug. He matched with me, we chatted for all of three minutes, and things got sexual very quickly. I actually ended up ghosting this guy and starting again on a teen dating site, hoping things would go better. They did, and I became a popular regular within a month. Everyone knew me (the fake me at least), and I went through a few online boyfriends before the year was out. Unfortunately, this particular site became a wasteland for people only looking for nudes, so the fun was taken away just as quickly. I was so starved for attention that I didn't think twice about joining a roleplay site, where I stayed on and off for another 3 or so years, until the traffic stopped and it died. These three years were my peak. I was starting to get money, and like any other 19 year old, I wasted all of it at the mall. I probably made about 1k in total, but I couldn't tell you for sure. But things were getting more difficult. More people had special requests. "Show me your Id with a quarter over the face", "take a selfie, close your left eye and hold up three fingers", "I want to see a video of you doing (this) to prove you're real" - I was able to avoid all of this by just being assertive. You would be surprised by how many people will back down as soon as you say you aren't a dog and pony show, or that you'll unfriend them for wasting your time. But like I said, that was my peak, so things would get worse. I moved to discord to roleplay, chat, and casually catfish. I wasn't looking for relationships or money anymore, but when it came along, I would bite to see where it goes. I ended up in a relationship with a guy who had some strange fetishes. If you're asking yourself which strange fetishes he liked, you probably thought of them already. Pretty sure he was autistic or something because this guy was a dry texter, unless it was about airplanes and trucks. Later on I found out he was 40 years old, had a physical disability, and he used to be an EMT. As the days passed, he got progressively more controlling, as he wanted to know what I ate, dressed in, spoke to, and the moment I came home from work. He would get upset if I wasn't available to chat daily (regardless of how tired I was), and he'd make me feel bad for skipping days. I got tired of it all in a span of 6 months, when he was "forbidding" me from moving to Florida for a job opportunity. I told him I couldn't do it anymore, and he had a hateful outburst that led to me ghosting him. He found my other profiles and would spam them with follow requests, but this escalated when my friends sent me screenshots of him threatening them to "stay away" from me. After a few weeks, this behavior stopped, and I haven't spoken to him since. I still think about him sometimes, since he did make me feel wanted to some degree, but it was a big eyeopener for an attention seeker like me too. After this, I scaled my catfishing WAY back. I ended up catfishing one more person, but I told him who I was when things got serious, and he found the IRL me more attractive. We are still together and I haven't catfished anyone since. He's a sweet guy and I sometimes think I don't deserve him. I might marry him, who knows? <3

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