I'm pretty much not out. My parents know that I don't feel comfortable living as a girl, but they don't know to what extent and have completely ignored it since I stopped seeing my GP last year. Even then they ignored it unless it was on the way to or from an appointment. My way of dealing with this since just before Christmas has been by spending time with my girlfriend (who also doesn't know me as male) because when I'm with her I can be comfortable, happy and can bear living this way. I know that it's not a long term solution, and it kills me to have to keep this from her, but she's too important to risk losing and the way I see it I'm only keeping my name and preferred pronouns from her, in every other aspect she knows me; I dress as a guy, I act like a guy, I pass a fair amount of the time, I'm just me in every aspect of my life apart from the name that people call me and the pronouns they use. Some people have even subconsciously treated me as male even knowing my by my birthname and when wearing my school uniform (which consists of a skirt). The only problem is, we've both been so busy with work and other stuff that we've hardly been able to see each other, which makes me panic that she doesn't want me around - I know I'm pretty much always being irrational but I find it hard to control negative thoughts - and leaves me with nothing to hold back my dysphoria.
Now that school's over the only time that I feel I don't pass is when I'm at work. I wait in a pub and aprons are just not something I'm able to pass in due to the way they accentuate hips and the general shape of my body (it also doesn't help as most of the local people know me as the landlord and lady's daughter). For some reason today not being able to pass at work today really got to me. It was probably partly to do with having spent the whole day binding and riding around on our mopeds with a guy from school talking about pretty stereotypical male stuff: alcohol, women and bikes.
Then, to make things worse, and I'm not quite sure why it did, there were some different people around the bar, one of whom I strongly suspected of being a trans woman. I'm not trying to be offensive in anyway, and I'm certainly not saying that she didn't pass amazingly well - she really did -, but I just couldn't help noticing things about her which screamed to my brain, which was already heavily focused on trans things, that she wasn't cis. I could have been totally off the mark, I'd already been wondering that night what I would do if someone I'd recognised from here ended up in the pub (I have pretty random thoughts when I'm washing up), but that was just how I read her. By the end of the night I was starting to think that maybe she'd noticed I'd picked up on her, maybe she'd realised something was off about me too I don't know, but I think I might of been getting into the realms of fantasy there.
I don't know why the possibility of another trans person being in the pub bothered me. I think it was seeing her surrounded by people who clearly accepted her for who she was, and passing so well that most people probably wouldn't give her a second glance past thinking "she's fairly tall", while I was there, glaringly female-bodied, and in some sort of limbo between transitioning and rejecting who I really am. Even in the trans community there seems to be hardly anyone who lives like me, most people seem to be either all out transitioning, or fighting to be able to, or rejecting it completely and throwing themselves into trying to be their assigned sex. And that just makes me feel even more lost really.
Sorry, I just needed to vent, and I know most people probably won't bother to read through all of this, and there's not much point to it, but there was no where else to get it out.