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 Just some ramblings about myself and my thoughts/feelings over the years, some of it feels really embarrassing but I hope it'll make me feel better to get these things out there.
 
 One thing I see commonly asked is if "there were any signs of it as a child". In my case I don't really think so; there are some minor things that stand out, but it's been such an incredibly long time and I don't remember them clearly so I wonder if my mind is just embellishing them or something. I don't know if I ever thought along the lines of "I'd rather be a girl" or whatever when I was that young. I also don't know if I've ever externally showed any signs, given that for a incredibly long time I've tried my absolute damn hardest to not ever act on these feelings or talk about them to anyone.
 
 The main thing is throughout my life I've fantasized/daydreamed a LOT, as a sort of escape I guess, and at some point (at least when I was a really early teenager, maybe even earlier) the 'main character' in my daydreams was almost exclusively a girl. I actually did think that was really weird at times, and occasionally tried to 'make myself' be a guy in my daydreams, only to quickly stop because I didn't enjoy doing so. Over time I've had more and more thoughts like "I'd like to see what it'd be like to actually be a girl", "I sort of wish I could've been born a girl", "It'd be nice if reincarnation existed so I could come back as a girl", "I wish there was some way to suddenly become a girl"... They became more severe and much much more common as time passed. But I had never considered the possibility of being trans (or if I had, I quickly dismissed it because part of me was afraid of not being "normal", which I realize is stupid now), so I convinced myself that "I'm a guy who feels at times like he'd much rather be a girl, but that's not an option, so I'm going to do my best to be happy as a guy".
 
 Then, near the beginning of October, Hazel posted a picture of herself; it was the first time time I had seen a full picture of someone who transitioned that I had met prior. It actually seriously annoyed me at first, as it kept popping up repeatedly for various reasons, and every time I was like "god dammit stop constantly reminding me of how much I wish I was a girl". And then over the course of a few days, it started slowly dawning on me that "uhhhhh, I'm being really jealous of someone that's trans, oh shit does that mean I'm-".
 
 So that led to a mix of incredible happiness and insanely severe stress. It's a massive completely life-changing thing, and I've pretty much had to overcome 25 years of denial and doubt, which is difficult as hell to deal with; plus the fact that it felt like I had been 'lying' to myself for my entire life, being so afraid about coming out to others, how difficult it'll be to transition... But also a lot of happiness because I finally had an explanation to how I've felt my entire life, that I was far from alone with these feelings, that I was wrong and I DID have the 'choice' to be a girl instead. One of the biggest issues to deal with (which still annoyingly pops up sometimes) is fear of being wrong; but the fact that it's not that I'm afraid of actually being a girl, but instead I'm afraid of NOT being a girl, sort of shows how ridiculous this fear is.
 
 To the ultimate question of "how do you know for sure you're trans", I suppose the simplest answer is that I feel so much happier when I think of myself as being a girl.
 
 
 I've currently made barely any progress towards transitioning. It's only been about a month, and it's been insanely confusing to deal with all of this, so I'm basically not sure where to even begin. I'm kind of happy that I came out a ton earlier than planned, though, as I can go ahead and do a million-times-easier 'online transition', which should hopefully make me a lot happier and make recent events a bit easier to deal with. I do have a name that I've always liked and am about 90% sure I'll want to go with, but I'm not ready to share it generally yet.