I have a habit of

I could write: "I have a habit of hanging back, lurking, not engaging interactively with things but just passively reading, watching, et cetera."

I could write that, but it feels a bit untrue? I could justify this as describing a frequency in the way things used to be. But: Why bother? What do I have to gain by doing so? I can't in this context see any good reason to do it.

Related idioms: "I always," "I never," "I usually."

These feel like they connect to a verb trying to prove its nounness. I'm reminded again of the quote: "Where is your smoking habit when you no longer smoke? Where is your depression habit when you are cheerful?"

When I think about using these phrases myself there's a sense of trying to prove that I am a solid definite continuous thing. There's a sense of trying prove that I have a continuous nature of "lurking." There's a sense of trying to prove that I am defined by such things as "lurking." There's a sense of trying to protect the self from an uncomfortable possibility of discontinuous change, to claim that doing other than I normally do is "a big ask" in some way, like trying to change the course of a glacier. There's a sense of cheems mindset, or can't-do attitude. It's self-insulting.

The idea starts to get on my nerves the more I think about it.