A Room of Her Own Heart
When Virginia Woolf wrote, A room of one’s own, she imagined a door that could shut out the noise the noise of expectation, of convention, of all the ways the world tells women who they should be. For her, that room was freedom.
I often ask myself: what would my own room have looked like as a girl? What did I need to write myself into being?
It wasn’t money, though that would have eased things. It wasn’t even four walls and a door, though solitude was scarce in a house alive with family, food, prayer, and ritual. What I needed was more elusive: permission.
Permission to speak feelings I didn’t yet have words for. Permission to love the girls whose laughter lit up corridors, the ones who made my heart race in ways I thought I had to hide. Permission to question, to stray, to be more than the “good daughter” who followed rules without complaint.
Growing up South Asian, Muslim, and female in Britain meant living with contradictions. I was hyper-visible, my skin, my name, my culture marking me stand out yet remain invisible where it mattered. Too brown in some places, not brown enough in others. I wore trainers when other girls wore lip gloss. I played football while they played with make-up. They called me a tomboy, as if that word could hide away the truth. It was easier for them to say tomboy than queer.
What I longed for most was a mirror, not just to see my reflection, but to see my experience. To know someone, somewhere, had lived this kind of girlhood and survived it. But the mirrors around me stayed silent. No books, no screens, no women I knew reflected my life back to me. So I learned to hide what was loud in my heart. I folded my queerness small, delicate as origami, tucked deep into notebooks and daydreams.
Girlhood was both sanctuary and prison. A sanctuary because imagination cracked open doorways into other lives through books, drawings, music, anything that let me escape. A prison because silence pressed so heavy against me it became part of my skin. There is a loneliness in being unseen, even when you are surrounded by people. A grief in not knowing the language of your own longing.
Woolf said women need money and a room of their own to create. She wasn’t wrong. But for a girl like me, what felt even more urgent was acceptance. Belonging. A world that didn’t demand I create different versions of myself to fit in.
And yet, perhaps that hunger made me a writer. On paper I built the room I couldn’t find in the world. The girl who once filled margins with half drawn skylines instead of neat handwriting, she still breathes inside every line I write.
My girlhood did not give me safety, reflection, or permission. But it gave me the ache to build what I could not find. It gave me the fire to imagine worlds where a girl like me brown, Muslim, queer can stand without apology and say:
I am here.
I am real.
I am worthy of love.
