Perhaps my own experience can be helpful. I was raised without any knowledge of what it meant to be trans or anything beyond the gender binary. I was forced so heavily into a role that I never got the opportunity to experience femininity in my childhood. When I finally learned about gender in university, something in me snapped into place and I realized I definitely wasn’t cisgender. I didn’t realize at the time that I was a woman, because I had “ruled it out” since I “wasn’t feminine enough” (flawed logic, I know, but bear with me here). I ended up identifying as agender for a time, until I finally realized that what I actually wanted was to be a woman, and to experience femininity that I’d otherwise been denied my whole life.

The point of this story is that I only identified that way because I failed to realize that things don’t just suddenly change like flicking a light switch. It takes a significant amount of time for you to find yourself, and that will involve reaching out for new experiences; things that don’t happen instantly. It’s easy to feel like nothing has changed, but perhaps the most important part in our journey has begun: we now understand that there exists an incongruence within us, and we’ve finally allowed ourselves to acknowledge that and begin the journey of discovering who we want to become.

We, as humans, are slow to change. Even when our mind is set, we can’t suddenly flip our lives upside down in the blink of an eye. We have to approach change one step at a time. So I’ll posit you a question, now that you’re beginning to understand that your gender identity is not what you’d been prescribed: what do you want to do about it? There are a million possibilities for what you could choose to explore, but where you start (and where you end up) is your own special journey to experience. What have you felt like you’ve wanted to do before, but didn’t because it didn’t align with your prescribed gender identity? What have you wondered about doing if things had been different? You likely won’t immediately know the answers to these questions, but they’re the kinds of questions that you can begin thinking about to understand where to start, and where to go next. There are so many things you can do from the safety of your own home, without requiring you to be seen by others (which can be incredibly scary at first). Start thinking about what it is you’d like to do. Change will only happen when you make it happen. The more we explore, the better we begin to understand ourselves.