In a healthy relationship, the participating individuals should not ever feel the need to hide their inner selves from their partners... or outer selves... their proclivities and interests and no-I'm-not-doing-that's.

... not that those things don't sometimes get hidden and held privately, but that shouldn't ever feel like a NEED for your own safety or twisted manipulations.

I do not come from a background of healthy relationships.

I am broken in the brain. I believe that everyone is broken in the brain, to some extent... we all have mental gears that either do or do not mesh with other folk's mental gears. When you find someone with whom your gears align and synch together, then things go well.

With enough lubrication, gears that don't synch up will give the illusion of synching up... depending on how much and how consistently said lubrication is applied, you may not even notice how much damage you're doing to said gears until things start breaking HARD and seizing up.

I have a history of having partners with gears that do not synch with mine, but being desperate enough for social contact that I felt that something damaging was better than nothing. I relied on alcohol as my lubricant, and I drank a LOT so as to keep having a good time and not care about how bad it was getting.

Regrettably, that caused long-term damage, and is a large source of why I hide so much of myself. My weirdness (specifically kinky) comes out in doodles and random blatherings that I get self-conscious about, and I can't chat-play without a severe backlash of regret and self-loathing so I entirely stopped doing that... and since it's difficult enough for me to show up visibly on social systems, that just made me hide further.

I'm basically saying that I'm sorry that I'm broken.