Over the last two years, Jade Mali has counted down the minutes until 5 p.m., excited to leave the office where she works as a regional manager at a real estate tech company and — in the process — leave behind what she describes as the “massive weight” of concealing her gender identity.

When she would get home, where she could comfortably present more femininely, she tells PEOPLE in an interview, she would start to feel like herself again.

Mali officially started her gender transition roughly two years ago, first sharing her trans identity with her closest friends and family. But the 28-year-old New York City resident — who has nearly 60,000 followers on TikTok under the handle “becoming_jade” — started to gain a following online when she made the next big step in her transition: sharing her gender identity at work.

“This wasn’t just like me getting something off my chest or me sharing something behind closed doors,” she says. “This was about to become a very public journey for me.”

Long before she entered corporate America — long before she even left the rural suburbs of Chicago where she grew up — Mali knew something felt “very different,” she says.

She doesn’t dive into details, but Mali acknowledges that, during her upbringing, she was aware that many around her “didn’t really want me to be that way.” As she grew older, she developed a number of social barriers while she struggled with the incongruency of her public identity and how she understood her gender.

“Having so many barriers to that truth created a lot of internal mental health issues that I had to work through,” she says. “It just took me a long time to sort of peel back all of these protective layers and all of these masks that I wore to finally reach a place in my adulthood where I was stripped down to nothing.”

Many years (and many therapy sessions) later, at 26, Mali finally felt comfortable to start sharing her trans identity with those closest to her, even before she started to change the way she physically presented her gender.

“I was telling so many people in my personal life I’m a trans woman yet still very much presenting masculine,” she says, acknowledging that the disconnect occasionally made those conversations “difficult.” “But for me, personally, I wanted to take it slow.”

Over the next two years, Mali started to explore options for her medical transition, began taking estrogen, and met with doctors to discuss facial feminization surgery — and she decided to come out at her corporate job, too.

“I knew that, appearance-wise, things were going to start changing,” she says. “People in corporate America don’t know you so deeply, so it was important to me that there was a little bit more congruence between what I was saying I was — which is a trans woman — and how I was presenting in this space.”

Mali knew it would be a difficult process: Because of the nature of her position, she interfaces with a large number of people at her job, though many do not know her very well. She first started by meeting with HR, and then she scheduled a call with a small group of employees who also work on the management level.

“I do work for a really progressive company, so there were never any concerns around my safety or my ability to even share this part of my life with people here,” says Mali. “I never felt concerned about that. I mostly just wanted to make sure that people had the clarity they needed.”

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Then it was time to share the news with the 130 people at her company, which she did in a single email.

“It was horrifying, honestly,” admits Mali. “I was so nervous. I was sick to my stomach.”

She timed the email with a vacation she was taking with her parents and her sister, and for the next several days, Mali didn’t even open her inbox. When she finally did, it was filled with dozens and dozens of replies — some paragraph-long and others short and sweet, but “so overwhelmingly positive” in their sentiment. To Mali, the response was “beyond freeing for me to see and read.”

Still, that first day back in the office was nerve-racking, and even now, she struggles to show up to work as her authentic self.

“I do feel anxious and guarded most days,” Mali says. “I’m just constantly challenging myself to break through that.”

But it is that same anxiety that made her realize how important it was to share her story online, she tells PEOPLE.

“I genuinely just didn’t see anyone that looked like me or had certain physical attributes that I had, and so it kept me really fearful, like, is this gonna work out for me? Can I really venture down this path?” she says. “By no means am I the first trans girl who’s ever shown parts or aspects of their transition on social media, but I do believe that there will never be enough representation of trans people out there.”

Mali’s account is a mix of updates about her transition at work, her journey with hormone replacement therapy, dispatches from her dating life and other general lifestyle content. Though the response has been “a mixed bag” — “we know how the world is right now,” she says — it has been incredible to see so many other trans people resonate with her experience online.

And when she looks back on her journey thus far, at the root of it, Mali tells PEOPLE, she feels “freer.”

“Nothing has changed and everything has changed,” says Mali. “I’m still me and I very much feel like the same person and yet so much about me has changed, like the physical appearance and how I present in the world.”

“It was like this constant like removal of my identity,” she continues about her life before transitioning at work. “I feel so much continuity in my life knowing that like who I show up as in a personal setting on a Saturday is how I’m showing up in the walls that I spend 40 hours a week.”