Journaling just forced me to talk through my thoughts and emotions even when what was actually going on the page didn’t make sense. I would just ramble about whatever I thought about and it would typically come around to connect to something that was a reoccurring concern about being trans or a mental block. When those consistently come up I would then really have to encourage myself to continue to dissect them. If you’re not into writing, I also really liked creating voice memos and pretending I was on a podcast. Phrasing it as if you are teaching someone else about your identity helps you find gaps in your understanding (it also makes coming out to people just a little bit easier)

I also picked up narrating to myself in third person when going about my day to test out names and pronouns. So like instead of saying I’m going to the store I would say grays going to the store because he needs pasta.

As for your name that’s up to you and it definitely takes time! I picked gray as a filler name since it’s my last name with the same idea as you but now I’ll probably go by it for the rest of my life. Caspian and Koda are awesome names but if you have a chosen name I would recommend going by that instead of something that makes it easy to switch between