I'm a recovering compulsive liar. I think my lies fell into two broad categories: lies about experiences or relationships that I told to seem "normal," and lies I told that exaggerated or invented problems in my life so that I could get attention and support. I suppose both stemmed from a desire to be loved and accepted.
My parents were very strict and isolating when I was a kid, and I wasn't very good at standing up to them. I never got to hang out with other kids outside of school, never rode a bike or learned to swim, never went on vacation, blah blah all the typical kid stuff. In the hellfire forge of people that is middle school my bad habit was born. It's hard to explain exactly what I was thinking, but it might have been something like this:
So in middle school I started lying. It wasn't a conscious "I'll do this now to solve this problem" sort of thing, but it's what I did. I'd lie about doing things I hadn't done. I'd claim to have been places I hadn't been. I'd make up reasons I couldn't hang out, and then make up stories about hanging out to seem normal. I'd observe people to figure out what was "normal" and act that way.
At first my lying was clumsy. I still cringe thinking about some times I got called out in middle school, like one time I claimed to have gone to central park in NYC and a kid originally from NYC asked follow-up questions I couldn't answer. I kept at it though, and by the time I got to high school I was pretty good at it, or at least good enough to pass for "normal" when interacting with casual high school acquaintances.
In high school I established a central group of friends, and though they knew more details of what was going on at home, I still lied a lot. In hindsight they must have known what was going on and I cringe to think about that. I cringe to think about lies I told like having girlfriends at other schools or having hooked up with people I hadn't (and who didn't even exist).
In high school, I also started lying about bad things happening to me, or really exaggerating the bad stuff. Like my parents were abusive in their way, but I'd exaggerate the abuse to make it worse than it was. Or I'd make up bad things that had happened to me. It seems so silly now because some of the stuff actually happening was bad enough that if I was honest people would have reached out with support, but I guess either I didn't want to talk about what was actually going on with me, or that I didn't think my problems were bad enough to warrant people's support. So I lied to solve those problems.
In college I had the chance for a clean slate but I kept lying about what my life was like in high school. This was pretty damaging when it came to dating, because holding on to lies about my dating past kept me from "risking" new relationships because I might seem inexperienced and be found out. I pretty much maintained the same patterns until my first year of graduate school. That year I told a really big lie to a few friends in the "made up bad thing happening to me" category (that I had slept with a girl they didn't know and she was pregnant), that lie escalated into super crazy territory, and I finally went to therapy for the issue. It took years before it was no longer my knee-jerk reaction to a lot of situations, but lying is no longer a copying strategy I use.
It's weird to think how far it escalated. It makes me very guilty sometimes to think that this was the coping strategy I landed on. I am best friends with a guy I've known since high school, and there are all these lies sitting between us, many of them he probably knows are false. I don't perpetuate them or bring them up anymore, but I can't stand to think about what this has done to the trust between us. It's hard to think about how lying about these things, especially after I left home, kept me from more positive relationships and from a lot of positive experiences. There is so much regret here.
My therapist says I should try and be more understanding towards myself, especially the kid I was in middle school. That I can't be too upset with that kid for using a coping mechanism that was effective in a lot of ways at the time. But still, why the fuck couldn't I just have had more courage, especially as I got older? I'm a great guy, people want to connect with me, and this behavior stood in the way of that for a long time. It still does in some ways. How would things be different now if I'd been a little braver and been myself?
tldr; just be yourself. Sorry for the wall of text. Goodnight.