On Twitter, I have found spaces carved out by people like me. This is a rare thing for me and many “others.” I know that with a simple tweet, search or direct message, I can find resources, opportunities and most importantly, support. Twitter helped me find community but also guided me when I needed some answers about the internalized misogyny, racism and ableism I’ve held and continue to hold. Some people, White feminists included, will dismiss Twitter as toxic but this raises a main question — Twitter is toxic for who? Although I myself have taken leaves from Twitter due to online harassment — sometimes even harassment from my own community — I still find the space to have a community of feminist Muslim women located globally. And even when I deactivate Twitter, women of color check in with me; sometimes I find them caring more about my mental health and well-being more than people I know “in real life.” Many of the Muslim women I’ve met on Twitter have become some of my closet friends.

I feel like many gnawing conflicting thoughts from my childhood were left untouched in compartmentalized boxes that I never unpacked. I grew up in Florida, where most of my adolescence was spent wondering why people disliked Muslims and how a few represented the whole. My family moved to Canada to get away from racism, but it followed. I went to high school in Oakville, Canada, a place known for two things: wealth and White people. I spent high school and the bulk of my undergrad years embarrassingly distancing myself from other Muslims but also questioning where I had community.

As a mixed race kid who isn’t a swirl (vanilla being white and the chocolate being a type of brown), I never quite fit in with either of my racial communities. I was like a puzzle piece that had gotten soggy and dried swollen, ill-fitting and awkwardly squeezed into the picture sometimes, but more preferably thrown out. Usually, people find solace and home in their cousin groups or ethnic groups but I was always too “Paki” for Arabs and too Arab for Pakistanis.

I kind of grew up falsely thinking hoping I was white.

Microaggressions flew over my head, ignored, packed, loaded, a coping mechanism for survival. As I became familiar with reclamation and feminism, I found myself alone. I could list my identities but couldn’t find my people or navigate a mixed race identity. Through Twitter I’ve found my footing in my identity and continue to re-learn how to articulate it.

Today if I have a question about something Pakistani, I do not hesitate to ask girl groups I’ve formed consisting of South Asian feminists I’ve met through twitter. If I have a question about my Moroccan half, I can ask my mom but similarly have found communities through social media.

Many of these Twitter friends I have met in real life and talk to daily. They have transitioned from Internet friends to women that I hope I’ll be lifelong friends with. These friendships are invaluable and I would have never made them offline. Our paths would have never crossed with people so alike at different intersections. When I find myself in homogenous spaces — whether in a classroom, work, or student senate — I have my feminist friendships that I’ve forged online that keep me going.

My knowledge base is not from women’s studies classes, something I see many women citing but also something that I do not have the mobility to take. My feminist education, rather, comes largely from women of color, specifically Black women on Twitter. I would argue this informal women’s studies education has been more enlightening than one that would’ve been produced in a classroom setting.

This Fall I was feeling alone, and the mental health concerns I’ve had in the past began crawl up as I started grad school. Part of what has saved me are my connections on Twitter. I found a Black woman in the second year of the same program as me through an event I was attending. I tweeted her letting her know how much her art of oral storytelling gave me hope about being a racialized woman in graduate school, but how I often felt alone. After a follow- and tweet-back, I reached out again. The next week we met and two weeks after that we met again, where she bought me frozen yogurt. In a very real way has saved me — she gives me the mentorship I’ve lacked in education and the big sister affirmation I think I’ve been needing. She lets me know I’m not alone and how to keep my energy going while navigating academia, but also a handful of resources I would have been slow to find as a first-generation student.

Similarly, on Twitter I found a professor who was following me. The first time we met, it was like finding the professor of my dreams. I know she is a text away when I need help or am feeling insecure. She assured me that I have every right to ask for things in graduate school because White men do it with such confidence, so why can’t I?

Recently I’ve started to wonder if other women who have identities on the margin find this same feeling of being alone together. I also wondered if they’ve had positive experiences moving the connections into the real world. Although, arguably I can see the Internet as indeed being the real world, I talked to some other Muslim women I admire to find out.

For Shireen Ahmed, whose favorite social media platform is Twitter, she’s “been really blessed to have found allies and friends who have become close friends via Twitter.”

Like me, Shireen also writes, specifically about women of color and Muslim women in sports. She reflected on this saying to me, “There isn’t a huge community. But I have found articles, writers, activists and athletes in the Twitterverse. Those connections have become fellow advocates and in many cases, part of a support system. We rant. We RT. We share. And we favourite. Sometimes we disagree. But there is an appreciation of ideas. And a shared understanding that we deserve to take up space.“

Shireen went on to say many other things that resonated with me about boosting the work of other women of color, as Twitter has been a space so generous to her. But she also shared a similar precautionary measure for when the Internet can get mentally exhausting for her.

“There can be a certain level of toxicity but with other women there, I feel that support is waiting,” she explained. “Sometimes, logging off for self-care is essential. During those times, the women who reach out to you have your back and care about your well-being.”

Nishi Fatima, who goes by @the_anecdoubtal on Twitter, also shared some of her insights of her experience of social media.

“The friendships have been supportive and educational. I have learned a lot from these ladies and they have provided a safe space for me to express my ideas and grow on issues such as appropriation and representation.”

As to why she values social media spaces, she continued by saying, “[t]he vast amount of diverse voices, that are otherwise voiceless, are able to unite to support each other and advocate for each other and for underrepresented communities.”

I can relate to this, as the bulk of my support system when it comes to academia is arguably from connections I’ve established through Twitter. She continued, “[b]eing able to connect with these ladies and engage in respectful, safe, intellectual and important conversations make all the other Twitter crap worth it. I feel incredibly more informed about a variety of issues thanks to these relationships, even if we don’t agree 100% of the time.”

Mental health and well-being is something I struggle with often. Working multiple jobs and being in graduate school full time as a first generation student piled on with other obligations that come in hand with my social reality. Twitter started as a space for me to unpack, rant and complain, but has morphed into so much more for me and many others. I now try to reciprocate the friendships and resources I’ve gained by mentoring younger Muslim women, sharing knowledge I learn and answering questions I receive from women or re-directing them to better resources.

The romanticism of Twitter can often outweigh the Brads and Beckies in my mentions harassing me. I know when I need a brown girl pal that believes in shine theory, I have them. And now beyond Twitter, they’re a text or call away.

Finding My Voice As A Muslim Feminist was originally published in Femsplain on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

From the age of six, I can remember wanting to be a doctor. I linked this to my own interactions and medical history, I had a great doctor and wanted to be just like them. My parents never instilled this dream in me contrary to popular belief. Additionally, I want to dispel the notion that not every visibly identified Desi family is filled with M.D.s and J.D.s. In fact, speaking from the context of my family, there are no doctors or lawyers on my maternal side. This is not to say that my family did not participate in and complete post-secondary degrees, but the paths they are currently pursuing are careers that they chose themselves. On the other side of my family, the “Khan” side with over twenty cousins, only two people have pursued medicine. The low rate of these careers in my family is not a result of failure, but more so the fact that there was minimal pressure to pursue certain careers.

“We Don’t Need Another Dr. Khan”

When these words were uttered to me I didn’t know how to process them or react. The words came from someone I once considered a best friend. Someone I had lived with during my undergraduate degree and whom I thought understood and respected me and could see beyond my skin color. Until the last two years of my undergraduate degree, I had steered far away from thinking of my identity and my own perception of it as well as how society views me and in a larger context.

Growing up, the majority of my life was a sea of whiteness.

I only interacted with my extended family on a more regular basis starting in high school. Don’t get me wrong. I do not have resentment towards my upbringing or white people but I do think it definitely lead me to have “color blindness”. Into university, it seemed that a constant element in my life was white people, but slowly I began to realize that I wasn’t white. This part is a bit more of a complicated realization, but most strikingly I realized I was very different from my own perceptions, and fellow women of color who became my friends unknowingly became my teachers.

It became an iterative process for me, realizing now in retrospect that I was silent on many occasions and systemically silenced by an inability to articulate an identity I still do not entirely understand.

Alongside this self-realization was acceptance of my heritage and understanding the importance of my familial history. I kept my goal in sight of becoming a doctor but with a new lens of doing it more so now to create safe spaces in healthcare. I realized the issues that my own parents had as newcomers navigating the healthcare system and trying to find empathetic, culturally competent physicians. I better understand now the need for safe spaces for refugees, queer, trans, and other marginalized groups to have a safe encounter with a healthcare provider.

Yet in this one phrase, “We don’t need another Dr. Khan”, the yearning I had to fulfill my childhood dream was stripped from me, with reference to my lineage.

If my last name was different, something more white, perhaps I would be seen as a “needed” person in this field. The collective “we” at the beginning of that statement also took me a while to unpack, it has made me cringe and I regretfully wish I had questioned this statement when it was said. I would hear it repeatedly throughout my last year of being friends with this person as others picked up on it and found it hysterical. The rejection of something I wanted, because of the stereotype of the “Desi Doctor”, an organic goal of mine has haunted me.

I worry now; constantly I feel anxiety when with my peers, wondering what they may think when I express my goals. I hesitate because I want to be identified as South Asian Canadian but weigh my words carefully because I fear being boxed into a category that I feel is stereotyped.

As a South Asian woman, I find that many assume I am complacent and passive. Navigating and asserting that I am not just “another brown girl” who wants to be a doctor is always only a thought or two away from me. The disdain some peers have for their nonwhite peers is something I have identified more easily now. The unwritten narrative of undeserved seats being occupied by the children of immigrants in post secondary education is one prevalent in Canada.

I sit in a classroom sometimes unfocused now, as my mind drifts to thoughts of how my peers perceive fellow classmates and me who are not white. As if I stole a seat that I had absolutely no right to or that I was forced into, as if I am not warranted or wanted to occupy a place or take any space because there are too many faces that look like mine.

I sit at a mental crossroads; my mind has a civil war raging inside as my stomach does summersaults when I get asked about my goals. I give answers or over explain myself to people who don’t deserve it because I am nervous about whether they truly believe this is a path that I want or one I am pressured into or whether they are bitter because I have taken some imaginary spot from them or a friend of theirs.

I also now constantly have to remind myself of my rights to a space, but do so with the knowledge that I have to deal with my brown embodied identity in addition to my womanhood and petite stature. I worry about whether I will ever be respected, or will I just be another “Khan” with a career in health, although I meet cut-offs and have a stellar CV will I ever be “needed”.

I worry because this is not the first time I have heard such comments. But, it took the first time for it being applied to me for me to understand how much it really hurt. It took this time for me to understand why it delegitimized my desires, which I have to now reassure myself I am allowed to have. The complexity of these falsely applied, problematic assumptions are an issue that I now find everywhere I turn.

Beyond this statement, I now grapple with the unwritten biases held by those who know and do not know me. I now constantly question myself, I also question if I will ever be accepted in any space. In South Asian spaces, in the context of my family I am the first girl going beyond an undergraduate degree. My urdu is minimal and so I walk a tightrope because even in that space I am not entirely accepted. On the other hand, in my academic world I am still viewed and labeled as “another Khan” not embraced nor respected from my work.

So what are the choices offered to me?

I want dignified choices where I won’t be judged for embodiment or dismissed. If I make this choice, will I have the fulfilling career I hoped for or will I constantly be contesting my autonomy in my choices and the fallacy that parents have forced me down this path?

This one choice serves as a microcosm for the dialectical state that my mind was in when processing my choices and the perceptions they may create.

It is one of many conversations I have with myself as my mind constantly thinks around my identity as South Asian diaspora.