Cin, I understand and sympathize with the family part of it, but with friends you have a choice. If they would not be your friends if they knew you were trans, then they were probably not worth being friends with anyway.
And about wasting any time in our lives or not being honest with ourselves, I think it all comes down to what or how much we could have known or figured out on our own. If we couldn't have, then why blame ourselves for it?