Being confused about your emotions and your relationship with your body is normal, especially for a trans person. It isn't actually possible to gas-light yourself, because you can't play tricks on yourself to make yourself think your losing your mind. What your describing sounds like conflicting desires, ambivalence, and/or cognitive dissonance.
-conflicting desires are normal, we are all pulled in many different ways by our family, friends, environs, and the pressures we accept in our social lives, jobs and responsibilities. Think about being trans as how you would be happiest inhabiting your body instead of how it relates to other people. Yes there are consequences for any choice or action we make regarding commencement or postponement of transition. If you let the pervading fear of the bad guide you, you'll never get to the good.
- ambivalence is also pretty normal. Many of us figure we have privileges we'll lose, we worry about what we're trading as though they are equitable. I'm a firm believer in transition, though it might not be everyone's preference. But there is no right time or way to begin and go through transition, there's only the here and now. If you plan ahead and do everything "perfect," you're still probably going to be outed, so I think the biggest hurdle of all is simply accepting yourself and surrounding yourself with people who you are already out to, and not really caring who does or doesn't know. When you aren't ashamed of who you are and what you represent, the demagogs and bigots lose their ability to harm us with their ignorant words. That doesn't mean that they can't still hurt our feelings by being jerks, and can still assault us with violence however, but letting them make you fear being happy gives them way more agency than they deserve.
- cognitive dissonance is when you believe conflicting things. A lot of transition is relearning things you thought you knew before. Maybe an easier way of getting past this is to look at truth as relative in a lot of situations. There are facts and hard black/white truths, but they aren't as ubiquitous as probabilistic truths. The more set in stone something is, the less relevant it tends to be IMO. Anyway, most cis people don't come across this dissonance without something they have blind faith in with zero context, and suddenly find a pertinent context that makes them question their blind faith for the first time. We trans folk are born with it when we have to choose between how we were assigned and how we identify.
I don't know which case fits you best, maybe it's something else altogether, or maybe it's a combination of things. Just know that you're normal, and if anything, this can help you make conscious and informed choices. The only person who can tell you that you are or aren't trans, and where on the gender spectrum you are most comfortable is yourself, or maybe a good gender therapist. I'm a big fan of experimentation and empirical evidence, so if you need to be persuaded, maybe by taking baby steps you will see the path you want to take after finding a bit more clarity.
I planned out my transition years before I mustered up the courage to do it, then I found that I was constantly adjusting my plans to fit my schedule and other commitments. Not everything goes to plan, but getting the initial inertia helped me keep taking steps forward instead of backtracking.
Hugs,
- Katie
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
