I live in a mad world of fictitious people and personalities. What I need to know is if this makes me a horrible person.

My earliest actions will go back to the days of AOL with screen names and email addresses. I had many. I had multiple accounts, some male, some female, some “people” to sit in rooms with me and fill up my buddy list.

Time went on and blogging became popular, especially on live journal. It seemed more female oriented, but I enjoyed being on the website anyway. However, I didn’t have a popular blog. I wanted the attention that other bloggers were receiving. I made multiple email addresses and multiple live journal accounts. I left myself comments. When real people saw that my blog was attracting attention, they gave me attention too.

Acceptance of other people has always been important. I was born in 1979 and grew up in a relatively safe period, but this period also required more interaction in person. When I didn’t fit in at school, I turned a lot to the internet world, and built up these profiles to show people in school that I could be accepted and that I was popular.

A few fake accounts turned into over 100, and spread across different websites as the internet and social networking grew. All these livejournal accounts then needed Myspace accounts, then facebook. I would post on my own profiles and leave myself comments. I would write back on their pages as if they were all conversations with people knew.

This became difficult when real people I knew wanted to add “mutual friends” and they started talking to these accounts. I talked back, sometimes for a few years and it spun out of control. I don’t know what to do because my real friends think these people are real. I guess the easiest thing would be to never use the fake accounts to talk to my real friends, or maybe to delete all the fake accounts, right?

Do you think I need to go out of my way and come clean? Do I tell my friends that the “people” they’ve been talking to are really me? How horrible would that be to find out? I think it would be easier and more polite to just try to stop. What do you think? My real friends have no personal attachments to these fake accounts, but I do imagine they would be very angry and confused to find out that they aren’t real people. I can’t even fathom how I would feel if an online friend turned out to be the fake creation of someone else and that the pictures, conversations and everything were not real. It’s been years. How would that feel?

This was never meant to be a mean joke against anyone else. I was never mean or rude to anyone else under the accounts. Everything started out to make myself feel better, to give me the attention I thought I deserved. What I realize is that I am more alone than ever. I spend hours every day talking to myself with these accounts, and I’ve isolated myself from real people.

I cant keep using my blogs to talk to myself. At times, to increase my popularity, I even copied and pasted other people’s entries as if they were my own. I then used the fake accounts to copy their replies and add the replies to my page.

I’ve given these accounts pictures, personalities, friends, desires, email addresses and now some have twitter accounts. Pretty much every site I joined, I wanted to be popular on. I wanted love, attention, and the higher my friend count grew, the more accepted I felt. I try to never bring up the internet in real life, because I don’t want to lie to my friends to their face.

I don’t know if what I’ve done is wrong. It was never meant to hurt or affect anyone else. Now I’m stuck. Do you think I need to come clean? Do you think I should just delete everything and pretend like it never happened? I can delete the Facebooks, Twitters, and Blog Accounts. Myspace, I’m not worried about. I haven’t logged in, in years.

Does this make my untrustworthy? Crazy? Is this a specific disorder?

I am now posting this on the biggest forums I can find. Invisionfree, Proboards, Healthboards, LiveJournal Boards, PsychBoards, and hope some of you out there can advise.

CAN ANYONE HELP ME?