Seeing this post of yours, I recognise myself quite a lot. I want to help further if I can. I've always kept switching between masculine and feminine ways. I know at heart I'm very androgynous (like a 50/50 mix of masc/fem traits) but am also drawn to extremes and polar opposites and I crave a constant change, basically. It's like I'm restless in my soul and can't find anywhere I belong. Balance is something I've tried to find my whole life. During my transition I also kept looking at old pics of myself, and sometimes I also dressed up "in drag" which was similar to how I used to dress pre-transition. Now I've realised that was me missing being a girl and being fine with my female body, but it only distressed me at the time cause it scared me.
I did not think it was possible I could find happiness as a female either... but then suddenly it flipped and I knew I couldn't be happy as a male instead. I missed myself as a female. Yet it hurts to accept myself as female, it feels too real. Parts of my mind is still fighting it and missing the lie I lived as it used to be comfy escape mechanism, but I just know that what I need now is to accept myself as cis. However I still hate and don't quite entirely conform to what society thinks women should do or be like. I'm trying my best to just be who always was all along, the mess of gender expressions that I am, but just use the label "woman" instead of "man". As I keep telling people I've come out to as detransitioning: I'm still myself, whoever that is.
If you don't feel happy as any gender, then I get the feeling that perhaps, gender is not the actual issues, but whatever is the actual issue shows itself vaguely in your perception/perspective of gender.
I'm also nostalgic and now I mourn both the femaleness I lost in transition, and the maleness I'll trade away as I detransition, cause I just cling on to the past for seemingly no good reason sometimes, and other times it is for good reason. But I have to choose and I know I'm choosing femaleness cause that's what feels right to me, although I think I'll actually keep my beard growth, simply because removing it would be irreversible, just in case I'd at some point want to transition back to male again. Call it a satefy net to fall on, maybe, I don't want to make more irreversible mistakes that can't be undone.
Detransitioning is hard, and I'm not having an easy time with it myself. Except from all the sadness, anger and actual grief I feel towards having transitioned and having lived as a gender I'm not... I know I see myself as a cis woman now, but I still get fleeting moments of wishing I could look like a man, and a lot of the time I don't feel any connection to either or any gender. I don't think of myself as nonbinary or genderfluid either. I think I'm really just very confused and that there's a storm inside my head that I need to wait out.
During the first week into my detransition, I was absolutely miserable. I woke up every day feeling completely messed up, like I couldn't hold the thought of "I'm a woman" in my head without feeling a need to puke, but at night I felt relieved and connected to my bio sex and like I loved being a woman, and then the next day it was the same procedure again, and so on, day after day.
But I'll give you the same advice I've given to myself on the point of feeling lost in gender: give it time and try to just let it sort itself out. There's no hurry to find a gender to identify with, and it's also fine if you'll never identify with any gender. The way I see it, I'm fine with having a female body now and I miss having that, and I adhere better to female terms and words than any other gendered ones now. Like that feels more like an intrinsic comfort than the male terms that felt more like a euphoric comfort, if that makes sense. So maybe that's enough for me to think of myself as female. Like reducing it to the simple basics and run with that.
When I was still in my transition, I loved being on T, thought it was the greatest thing and often jokingly referred to it as "the perfect drug" whenever remotely appropriate to say that, but now I just wish it would leave my body asap cause I miss looking more like myself again, being connected to my emotions like I was before, being able to cry again, etc. How you feel about each hormone can change over time. Just because T felt good back then doesn't mean it has to feel good now if it doesn't.
