It began with a long attempt to not look too hard into the fantasies of being a girl or to transition that more or less dominated my internal life as a kid. Then as a teenager I asked myself seriously if I was trans and found a stupid argument I could stretch to say I wasn't. I spent the next year or so low key thinking that there was a 50% chance I'd transition later in life.

Then at 18, after a high school religious retreat, I accepted that at least a part of me was female and I wasn't cis. I spent the next year and a half closeted nonbinary identifying.

At 19 everything just kinda started overflowing. I was seeing online trans women start to appear that were just like me, and they made it less scary. And I decided I'd start experimenting with femininity. I made some breast forms and something just kinda clicked there. As that night went on I started really thinking about my dysphoria and how while it had a sinusoidal steady state solution, the transient solution continued increasing (calculus is transing genders, you heard it here first). Then it just clicked. I still remember my first thoughts: "fuck I'm a woman. Shit, that makes me gay. Fuck, my life's going to be hard isn't it."

After that it was just a question of if I tried to keep it hidden until I could dip out of everyone in my life's life or come out and transition quickly. I'm glad I chose the latter.