I hope I'm posting this in the right section, if not staff feel free to move it. I saw a similar topic being discussed in this board so decided to make the thread here.

Around the time I started being active on forums was when I started making fake accounts on them. At first I just did it to make my own forum look more active and appealing. Over time without realizing it it began to turn into a habit and I couldn't go one forum without doing it. A couple of years later it got to the point where I was so unhappy about myself and my own life that I drowned myself in an alternate persona online and then surrounded that persona with friends that didn't exist. Until I grew guilty and came clean in the community I was lying to. While the people there took it better than I ever could have expected, minus a few, and while they make other claims to while the forum there is as inactive as it is today, I can't help but think my lies and the paranoia to follow help contribute to its current state.

You think that would be enough to get me to quit for good, right? No. By the end of the same year I confessed on I was back to it. Only this time it lasted for four years until I was caught by a few people, who for whatever reason never outed me, and I work to gradually let these persona go inactive and move on. It had gotten to the point where I was too afraid to confess and the lie was bigger than it was previously. Said site would die a few months later, partly due to me being too guilty to even so much as look at it. Yet, the attachment to these personas remained and I ended up bringing a few of them back on another forum, then I stopped again.

Then just yesterday I made a new persona altogether, regretted it the moment I posted with them and then had it removed. I was so embarrassed and ashamed of myself I thought of just unplugging the computer and fading away from the Internet completely. And that's why I'm here.

I can't afford a Therapist so I can't seek professional help for this. I'm just wondering if this is all rooted in some deeper psychological problem that I'm not seeing, a more tame personality disorder or am I just a pathological liar?