TL;DR This is a long f*cking rant and I was the textbook definition of an egg and it basically took someone telling me to my face that I seemed to naturally gravitate towards a more feminine appearance and mannerisms and way of thinking for me to crack. It was not instantaneous, and I spent months grappling with it before reaching a conclusion. This is a long as hell post. Read at your own despair.
Addendum: I spent hours writing and re-writing this aaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

It's funny, looking back I was just utterly oblivious. For context, I'm 22, and just graduated uni last year, right about as I was realizing I was trans. For as long as I can remember I've rejected practically every male aspect of my appearance and hated those I couldn't change. [Two paragraphs have been truncated into the remainder of this one]. My hatred for really any outward appearance of masculinity led to a lot of appearance choices that, as you might guess, lent me a more feminine appearance in general. Combine that with the fact that my only real form of exercise is cycling (every day is leg day) and the fact that I'm very light for my height, and oops my silhouette is not a masculine one. I won the lottery on a lot of aspects of my appearance not being overtly male, i.e. face, adam's apple, generally thin hair (except my fucking legs, because of course). If I keep my shoulders down, I look. . . narrow enough, I guess. I always hated having short hair, hated my body hair, never really felt a whole lot in common with my male peers, never liked being shirtless around others, etc.. I've also always chosen pretty ambiguous clothing.

Fast forward to 2020. COVID happens, and now everyone is wearing masks, including me. Funny story, it turns out if I'm wearing a mask, the ambiguity skyrockets, and of course because I had striven to quash any overtly masculine aspect of my appearance, every now and then, someone would mistake me for a girl. And this. . . didn't actually bother me. I liked it. I found it sort of neat that I could be seen as a girl. Can you imagine how dense I was to not connect the dots at that moment? Seriously. Every now and again I would look in the mirror and think to myself, "Wow, I sorta look like a girl, and I like that!" and my utterly inept little brain just couldn't quite compute an end meaning for that (though that may have been due to the fact that I really didn't have the emotional capacity to spare, being in a really dark place mentally, and too busy with my studies to care). And this would continue for another almost two years, of me being enamored with every feminine aspect of my appearance, and hating every masculine aspect of my appearance. And realizing nothing.

Last year was very different from the rest of my life for a number of reasons. I graduated from university, and simultaneously wrapped up my 3-year flight training endeavors with my CFI/CFII certificates. It was important because now I finally had time to think about something other than school (or just general misery), and oh boy did I spend a disturbing amount of time thinking about who I am. And over the span of 7 months or so, it fucking clicked. This funny r/egg_irl place I had joined for the oddly relatable memes started to look less like memes and more like an accurate depiction of some of the things I had experienced. This was also the first time I had any friends who were close enough to pick up on the fact that I had clearly put effort into looking and to some extent generally appearing to be a girl (to be clear, this was somehow not something i considered a deliberate goal), and drunk enough to tell me I'd look cute as one. It wasn't instantaneous, but around August/September, I really started thinking about who exactly I was. By November, I was having a pretty severe existential crisis, and in December, I finally started to settle into the realization that maybe rejecting every masculine aspect of my appearance and taking pleasure in appearing and being seen as a girl was not a coincidence.

When you get right down to it, I've sort of known I didn't belong this way all along, but I've just operated under the unchallenged assumption that I was supposed to be a boy for some reason. Once I broke free of that assumption, I realized I could be me, but deliberately.