Being different is powerful - welcome to The Power Of Being Different
Let's get started with this
I’ve been hearing about Substack for a while from my business partner and friend
. This platform has been making her happy, so I’m giving it a go too. It will be an outlet for all the thoughts and ideas I have in my head while I procrastinate on getting back to writing my novel which I have half-written. I think I will aim for posting every other week, perhaps weekly, and I’m not going to add extra content for paid subscribers as I’m not sure how I feel about that at the moment. I would prefer to keep it as free content instead of doing what we’re supposed to do. You will see that is a theme in how my head works. Tell me something we’re supposed to do and I will think of different ways to do things.The Power Of Difference
And that brings me to the power of difference. What so I mean by that? Well, I have always been the one who was different in some way. I grew up in deepest East Anglia where everyone was white and we were the brown family in town with a house that smelt of spices with my Mum wafting around in saris. At school it was similar. Everyone lived very different lives to me. I was so different that the teachers said they couldn’t say my name so they shorted it to Mo. I’m now toying with going back to my full name of Mousumi (Mow-Shoo-Me) but it’s been so long since I’ve used it that it doesn’t feel quite right to ditch the name I’ve used for years and years.
me in a nursery school photo with a runny nose and dungarees with trains on
The differences also existed in the other spaces I was in. Amongst the Indian community, we were the ones that didn’t live in London and lived in a small town by the sea. That experience put me off small towns completely (I’ll come back to that subject another day!) I didn’t speak Bengali well. I was short and all my London cousins were tall. All the Bengali kids wanted to be doctors and study science. I liked reading books and writing stories. They were all tall and slim with shiny black hair. I had frizzy curly hair and I was chubby.
Back at school, a lot of the time when I was young I felt embarrassed and awkward for being different. Until around my late teenage years when I started to embrace it and be deliberately different. And I haven’t been able to shake off that idea since then really. I can’t bear it when people expect me to do things because they do. For example, I find December excruciating as everyone expects me to talk about Christmas and I don’t want to. Actually it starts in October, which is pretty rude really when there are other religious festivals before then. We celebrate Durga Puja in October and a lot of people I know celebrate Diwali in November. Then it goes on into January ‘did you a nice Christmas?’ I am asked endlessly while I roll my eyes.
Everything changed for me when I discovered Brighton. I fought the battle to go to Sussex University. An Uncle said to my Dad that he would never ‘send’ his daughter there to study English. To which my Dad shrugged and said he didn’t have any say in the matter.
I chose the course at Sussex because it was different. There were no obligatory courses on Shakespeare, Dickens or Chaucer. I studied Black Women’s writing, and challenged ideas about Empire and colonialism. I found a place where it was cool to be different and challenge thoughts and ideas. All these years later, my love of Brighton remains true. It’s the place I love to live in and hang out in and I found a place to call home.
But even that love has required standing up for difference. Over the years I have seen so many people move to Brighton because they love it. Then move away because of the crazy house prices they get fed up with. Then they spend years saying how terrible Brighton is and don’t I agree? With an expectation that I will agree with them as if we all have to like the same things. I don’t hate Brighton, I’ve never fallen out of love with the place. I love it, and I find new things I love about Brighton as the years go on and life changes. That doesn’t in any way invalidate people’s love of their new towns and villages they move away to. Wouldn’t it be boring and quite awkward if we all wanted to live in exactly the same places?
I must have really enjoyed the feeling of difference. After university I progressed my career into the tech industry. I was Vice-President of Global Sales and Marketing for a FTSE250 tech company, so I did well, but had to fight for my right to be different every step of the way. The photo above is from one of the annual sales conferences. I remember it well, it was at a hotel up a mountain in Grenoble, France. As you can see, I was quite different to everyone else. And just in the background I can see the only other woman of colour who was there. She was the HR Director and she became my mentor and we are still in contact today.
I loved that role for years, being the one who stood out. Until I didn’t. Despite all the money I earnt and all the experiences I had, I eventually got bored of the travelling and the endless revenue reporting to shareholders.
And that brings me to where I am now. During the pandemic
and I founded a diversity and inclusion company, Watch This Sp_ce. And it’s been as amazing as much as it’s been tough. We have won awards, worked with amazing clients, gained recognition, grown the team and people recommend us regularly. We have also had really tough times. As it’s tough running a business and we learnt a lot about who to trust along the way.For two writers, the best thing ever happened last year though. We were approached, (yes approached!), by a publisher to write a book. And we wrote it in just a few months. The final words went to the publisher yesterday. And the book is available now for pre-order and published in September. It was even labelled as a ‘hot new release’ by Amazon when it first got listed. And yes, in it, we write about valuing differences!
