Why does it feel like no one knows the real me?
It feels that way because you have gotten very good at showing people a version of yourself that works, and it has been working for so long that even you sometimes forget it's an edit. The gap you're sensing is real. It's the distance between the self you perform and the self that exists when nobody is watching.
You learned the edit early
Most people who feel this way didn't decide one day to hide. They learned, usually young, which parts of them got a good response and which parts made a room go quiet or made someone they needed pull away. So the responsive parts got amplified and the rest got quietly filed under private. By adulthood this isn't a conscious strategy anymore, it's just how you walk into a room. You lead with the version that has never once failed to land, and the version that hasn't been tested in years starts to feel like a rumor even to you.
The edit is not a flaw, it's a skill you overuse
The instinct to read a room and adjust is not dishonesty, it's a form of intelligence, and it probably served you well somewhere specific, a house where the wrong mood at the wrong time cost you something, or a job where the polished version got promoted and the honest version got overlooked. The problem isn't that you can do this. The problem is that you do it everywhere now, including with the two or three people who would actually stay if you stopped. You've generalized a survival skill past the situations that required it.
Being known and being understood are different things
Plenty of people around you can accurately describe you, your habits, your opinions, your sense of humor, and still not know you, because knowing requires you to hand over something before you're sure it's safe, and understanding requires the other person to receive it without flinching or fixing it. Most people are never actually asked to do the second thing because you never give them the first. It's not that people are incapable of knowing you. It's that you've never handed them the material and then stayed in the room to see what they did with it.
What actually helps
Pick one low-stakes moment this week and say the true, slightly less flattering thing instead of the smooth one, not a confession, just an honest sentence you'd normally edit out, like admitting you're anxious instead of saying you're fine, or saying you disagree instead of nodding. Watch what happens to the relationship, not to your comfort. The evidence you're gathering isn't whether it felt good, it's whether the person is still there afterward. Do this enough times with enough people and you build a small, real sample size that says being known doesn't end you, which is the only thing your nervous system actually needs to hear.
When this runs your life, it usually traces to one underlying pattern. For this, it is most often the Ghost rhythm, the thing under the behavior.