Growing up Queer and Muslim, I Spent Years Imagining the Future

When I was younger, I spent a lot of time imagining the future.

Not in the way adults asked me to. I wasn’t thinking about careers, mortgages or retirement. I was asking quieter questions. The kind that kept me awake at night.

Would I ever feel like I belonged?

Would I find people who understood me?

Would there be a place for someone like me?

Growing up queer and Muslim in Britain, the future often felt like a blank page. Not because I lacked imagination, but because I lacked examples.

I rarely saw lives that looked like mine reflected back at me. Stories about faith and sexuality often seemed to end in conflict. Stories about queer love rarely included people who carried the same cultural and religious inheritance that I did. Even at university, when I searched for research that reflected my experiences, I found very little. There were gaps everywhere.

I think often about the person I was when I started university.

I wasn’t out to everyone then. I carried different versions of myself into different rooms, constantly judging which parts were safe to reveal and which parts were better left unsaid.

I remember sitting among a group of students when someone made a homophobic comment. The room carried on as normal. Nobody challenged it. Nobody seemed uncomfortable.

I froze.

I remember wanting to say something, wanting to defend people like me, but not yet feeling brave enough to reveal why it mattered. So I stayed silent and carried the moment home with me.

Years later, while writing my dissertation, I found myself searching for something else: evidence that people like me existed.

I wanted to focus on the experiences of Muslim lesbians in Britain. I wanted to understand how sexuality, faith and belonging intersected in women’s lives. But as I worked my way through books, journals and research papers, I kept encountering the same thing. There was work on Muslim gay men. There were discussions about male sexuality. There were studies, interviews and analyses.

But when it came to Muslim lesbians, there was very little.

I remember staring at my screen and wondering where we were.

Were our stories considered less important? Less visible? More difficult to talk about? Did women have more to lose? Or had our experiences simply gone undocumented for so long that people assumed they did not exist?

The questions stayed with me.

Long before I became a writer, I knew that one day I would write about my own experiences. Not because I thought my story was extraordinary, but because I knew it was missing.

At the time, I could not clearly see my future. I did not know what my life would look like, who I would become or whether I would ever fully belong.

What I did know was that silence leaves gaps.

And I hoped that if I wrote honestly enough, someone else might one day find themselves in the spaces where I had once gone looking.

So I learned to live in questions.

I wondered what kind of adult I would become. I wondered what parts of myself I would have to leave behind in order to be accepted. I wondered whether belonging was something other people found naturally, or something people like me spent their lives searching for.

What I didn’t realise then was that one day the future would arrive quietly.

Not all at once.

Not with certainty.

Not with every question answered.

But gradually, in ways I could never have predicted.

For years, I imagined the future as a destination.

I thought there would be a moment when everything finally made sense. A moment when I would wake up feeling completely certain of who I was and where I belonged. A moment when the tension between different parts of myself would disappear.

I was wrong.

The future arrived, but It didn’t arrive with certainty.

It arrived in ordinary moments.

It arrived in finding myself coming out more than once, and sometimes not at all. It arrived in conversations with people who understood things I had spent years trying to explain. It arrived in friendships that required less translation. It arrived in spaces where I could bring more of myself through the door.

It arrived in love, in heartbreak, and in all the uncertainty in between.

If you had asked my younger self what the future looked like, I am not sure she would have been able to answer. Some possibilities felt too distant to imagine. Others felt impossible to speak aloud.

Yet here I am.

Married to the woman I love, out to my family, and building a life that once existed only as a fragments of hope.

There is something surreal about living inside a future you once thought might never belong to you. Sometimes I catch myself during the most ordinary moments, drinking tea together, discussing what to have for dinner, planning a weekend away and I remember the younger version of myself who was simply trying to make it through another day.

She could not have imagined this.

Not because her dreams were too small, but because she had so few examples to learn from.

For a long time, I thought happiness would arrive as a grand revelation. Instead, it arrived quietly. It settled into the everyday rhythms of a life built honestly.

The future did not erase every question.

There are still moments when I feel caught between worlds. There are still conversations that require courage. There are still parts of my story that some people struggle to understand.

But the difference is that I no longer measure my life by other people’s understanding of it.

The older I get, the more I realise that belonging is not something granted by a community, an institution or another person. It begins with allowing yourself to exist fully, even when doing so feels uncomfortable.

For years, I thought I was waiting for permission.

What the future taught me is that permission was never coming.

I had to give it to myself.

Perhaps that is the biggest surprise of adulthood.

Not that all your questions are answered, but that you learn to live alongside some of them.

As a teenager, I thought the future would be a place where uncertainty ended. Instead, it became a place where uncertainty mattered less. The questions that once consumed me no longer sit at the centre of my life. They are still there, but they no longer define the shape of it.

The future I imagined was built around survival.

The future I live in is built around living.

There is writing now. Words published under my own name. Stories that once lived only in notebooks finding their way into magazines, websites and the hands of readers. There is a quiet satisfaction in contributing something I once searched for myself.

The older I get, the more I understand that representation is not simply about seeing yourself. It is also about becoming visible enough that someone else might see themselves in you.

When I was younger, I searched for stories that reflected my experiences. Stories about faith, identity, belonging and queer love. Stories that held complexity instead of forcing people to choose between different parts of themselves.

I did not find many.

Perhaps that is why I write now.

Not because I have all the answers, but because I know what it feels like to go looking for them.

Sometimes I think about the younger version of myself and all the things she worried about. I wish I could sit beside her and tell her that life would become bigger than she imagined. That there would be love. That there would be joy. That there would be moments of belonging she could not yet see.

I would tell her that she would not become fearless.

But she would become brave.

I would tell her that some people would misunderstand her, and that she would survive that too.

Most of all, I would tell her that the future is not waiting somewhere in the distance.

One day, almost without noticing, she will be living inside it.

And when she does, she will discover that the life she spent so many years hoping for is not perfect.

It is something better.

It is real.