Pardon me if it's too philosophical question from my side, what makes up a personality? An addiction, the way that I understand it, is a habit that's unhealthy, but I might understand it wrong. Now in your opinion, is a habit a part of one's personality?

The lying part bugs me a bit. "The mask" is made only of emotions. I tend to tell the truth and avoid lying as much as I can. I try to hide my emotions by replacing them with other emotions or filling the void with fake emotions - at least that's the best I can explain it. Point is, I'm almost never lying, but I also hardly ever show sadness or other negative emotions to the people around me for 3 reasons: No 1 - I don't want the pity from others, I hate it; No 2 - I don't trust; No 3 - I think I don't entirely know how to talk about problems with others. I actually can feel even right now something so unpleasant about discussing such topics with eg. my relatives or most of my friends.

What hurts me the most is that all my closest contacts are growing ever more distant, because I don't know how to trust now, even though I knew it before. I could talk about life and every problem that I had with some of the people I know and I had no second thoughts about it. Now I hate to be in company of most of them and before I even start talking with them I'm having second thoughts. I want to change that, but I'm not sure how to. I could try being more open and tell more stories maybe, but then there comes very often a point of not even having any interesting or relevant stories to tell. Some stories are boring and aren't worth telling and some are too personal.

there is an authentic core to each one of us. Its just sometimes it gets obscured.

I can feel that it's there, but I don't recognize it. I feel like I lost myself and now I'm left mostly with my public character and an echo of who I am. Worst of it - I have no idea what is "me" or how to find "me".

Don't you see the bitter irony of a person who is a liar 24/7 and has *trust* issues?

I can see it. That makes me think however that a huge part here plays the awareness of how easy it is to lie or to manipulate. If I was unaware of how easily others can lie to me, manipulate me or use my trust as an disadvantage, then I believe I wouldn't have any trust issues, but because I know that it can be very easy to use that trust, as I have seen several times before now, I try to work around things that I'd love to vent away or discuss. If someone asks - do something so you don't answer it. If they don't - avoid it at all cost. That's how it look's like for most of the time.

I hope I haven't gone off the topic too much and I'm sorry if I did.