I'm sure you’ve all heard of Catfishing. And no, I don’t mean the actual fish. I mean the “art” of pretending to be someone you’re not, most often on social media. More often than not, these “relationships” are usually romantic. The term was coined after a movie about a young guy, Nev Schulman went on an adventure to find the real person he had been speaking to on the internet. In the original movie, the husband of the original Catfisher made a comment about how putting catfish in a tank with cod will keep them active, which would ensure the quality of the cod when it was delivered to the market. Off of that came the analogy that there are people in everyone’s lives that keep each other active, always alert and always thinking, after which he suggested that people should always be alert while socializing on the internet.

Unfortunately for me, the movie came out two years too late. I had already been hooked.

Yes, I was catfished.

It all started in the summer of 2008.

I had been staying with my family on Long Island, and my sister and I were bored and wanted to meet some people to go to the mall with. We started a profile on this platform called MyYearbook and set our location to the next town over to see who we could find in the area. One particular person caught my eye.

His name was Trevor and we immediately connected.

He was around my age, and lived in East Islip, Long Island, which wasn’t too far from my house at the time. The first day we started talking it was like I had known him my entire life. Within the next few days, we started to make plans to hang out. We were going to go on a date. On the day of our date, he texted me telling me that he couldn’t make it because he was sick, and we would have to reschedule. Obviously, I was devastated, but people get sick and it is what it is.

We tried to reschedule but it just got to the point where both of us were having scheduling issues, so we put it on the back burner. But we still remained very close and things were budding at an extremely fast rate.

Skip forward a few years.

By this point, I had made friends with all of his friends. I knew everything about him, and we had tried a relationship but it didn’t work out. Believe it or not, I knew better than to commit to someone I couldn’t see. We would Skype, but he always said that his camera was broken so I just kind of sat there and looked at a black screen. We talked on the phone all the time though, so I guess that was a plus. He introduced me to his friend Danny, who I took extreme interest in and we started talking. However, the same issue still plagued my mind. How can I have a real relationship with someone I’ve never met? And every excuse in the book was used when it came to talking to him on the phone.

Skip to freshman year of college.

It had been five years since Trevor and I became friends, and the fact that we still hadn’t met up would cross my mind every once in a while, but like I had said earlier, I didn’t have time. I had my own problems to deal with, and traveling to Long Island was not on my to-do list.

Now, we come to the most recent issue.

Some time had passed and I was home for the winter. Trevor and I hadn’t spoken in a while, so I called him to catch up on life. We talked for a little while, until he said he had to go but he would call me back. I was bored, and ironically enough, Catfish was on TV. I typed in his phone number, and I was shocked (seriously) to see that the number was connected to a photography page that was run by a girl from, you guessed it, East Islip, Long Island.

I was LIVID.

How could I have been so stupid? I looked on her page, and there were pictures of Danny, who was an aspiring singer. That was all the proof I needed. She had been caught, and I was not only angry, but sad. I felt disgusted and betrayed. Eight years. How do you keep something like that up for EIGHT YEARS. Nev and Max would have been proud. I searched and searched, and finally found the real Trevor. His name was Kyle, and this was the person I had been friends with for years and he didn’t even know I existed. That was when I texted “Trevor” and asked him if he knew the girl. Her name was Tori, and when I mentioned her, he blocked my number.

Now, I know the question is going to pop up, so let me clarify. Trevor did have a higher voice for a guy, but he told me that he had a lot of health problems so I just credited it to that.

I reached out to Kyle and Danny to let them know what was going on. Before I was able to take screenshots of the profiles, all of them had been deleted. And I mean ALL of them. There were between five and ten, and they were all gone. All I had left were the screenshots of the few text messages and what I could find in my Facebook messages.

What a great way to start out 2016.

Tori contacted me that day and was very upset about my accusation. We talked, I told her everything and I told her that she needed to be honest with me. She knew everything about me, my family and my friends. But she wouldn’t admit to it. The anger and hatred in me were growing and growing, almost ready to burst. Finally, I just decided that I felt bad for her.

The last contact we had was her telling me that Verizon had changed her phone number. She believed it was hacked. For eight years? No. I may have been stupid enough to believe that she was Trevor, but I’m not stupid enough to believe that her phone was continuously hacked for eight straight years.

As of today, I've been blocked from seeing her photography page, as well as her personal Facebook page. Kyle and Danny have gone on with their lives as if this never happened and my best friend Trevor no longer exists. I still think about it from time to time, mostly when statuses I had posted about him show up on my Facebook memories. Other than that, Trevor is a thing of the past.

It's hard to admit that you've been Catfished for so many years. But I guess there’s a lesson to be learned here. This really can happen to anyone, so be careful who you talk to. Thankfully the only damage this caused was emotional but for some, it has caused a lot more.

Stay safe, y’all.