What if the thing that sets you apart is actually the source of your greatest strength?
If you’ve ever felt like you don’t quite fit in,
If you’ve lived across borders—geographical, cultural, emotional—
If you’ve had to explain who you are before being allowed to simply be...
This one is for you.
In the second episode of WanderWomen: The Podcast, I speak with Hanae Bezad—impact entrepreneur, investor, author of Being Other, and one of the most thoughtful voices I’ve encountered on identity, cultural fluidity, and what it means to truly belong.
Born in Morocco, educated in France, rooted in Africa’s tech transformation, Hanae has spent her life at the intersections:
🌍 Between cultures
🌐 Between disciplines
💡 Between systems and imagination
Her journey—from digital strategist in Paris to policymaker in Kigali, to creative curator in Lisbon and investor in Canada—is anything but linear. But it is deeply intentional.
What we talk about in this episode:
🌀 Reimagining home as a return to self—not a fixed place
👣 Living through the “biology” of immigration and the cost of starting over
🎤 The quiet power of being witnessed, and how music, creativity, and voice create spaces of belonging
📖 Writing Being Other and how storytelling heals us—first internally, then collectively
💼 And how to carry your experience without letting it become your baggage
“Don’t bring your past into your future.”
That line stayed with me long after we hit stop on the recording.
If you’ve ever felt like the outsider, listen to this.
Not because it’ll tie everything up neatly—belonging isn’t a tidy concept.
But because Hanae invites us to sit with the complexity of being different—and to see it as sacred.
💬 "Home is a dialogue."
💬 "Being other is an invitation to create new language, new meaning, new space."
💬 "You can walk with doubt and still move forward."
📚 Learn more about Hanae’s work & her book Being Other: https://beehane.org/about/
🌀 Feeling called to share your own story? DM me.
New episodes of WanderWomen drop every second Friday.
We’re just getting started.
With love,
Shivangi
✨ Pre-order my book WanderWomen: How High-Skilled Immigrant Women Thrive – a memoir and movement for women reinventing themselves beyond borders:
👉 https://www.shivangiwalke.com/wanderwomen
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