patrice gopo on the power of human connection
name | patrice gopo
affirm your identity | fearfully and wonderfully made
her most recent book | all the colors we will see: reflections on barriers, brokenness, and finding our way
your current inspiration | skillshare.com (there are so many ways of pursuing creativity!)
COMMUNITY CARE
how has sisterhood informed and shaped your journey?
i typically refer to myself as a black american, jamaican american, or sometimes black jamaican american. i also have indian ancestry, which is interesting because frankly, if you were to divide me numerically, i would be half indian. yet, there is an aspect of how we see ourselves and how society more broadly sees us. those two pieces play into this formation of identity and self—who we are and who we see ourselves as being. the people in our lives who affirm the stories we hold are the people who are familiar with these narratives, open to what they might be, and acknowledge the reality that we don’t share the same stories. it’s important that we have those people because as we move through dominant culture and move through predominantly white spaces, there is often this sense of trying to make people who are not the normative narrative somehow conform to it.
while that might make lots of other people more comfortable, it robs us as black women of our unique experiences and how we’ve been shaped by them. it’s important that we find spaces where we can truly be all of ourselves. that’s an ongoing journey. i am a black woman and i’m a jamaican american. i have this multicultural ancestry. i am also a writer, i am a chemical engineer. i am a daughter, and i am a mother. there are many facets of who i am. i don’t think any one group will fully recognize or affirm all the various experiences that we may have. i still feel it’s vital that many voices speak into our lives. but for black women, especially black women who may have grown up in predominantly white spaces, that aspect is often missing from our experience. we may have affirmation in many other areas, we’re often missing that sense of affirmation in that area.
how does your faith play a role when realizing that people who share your faith speak and act like other human beings are less than them?
it’s been a journey to reconcile those experiences. i would offer people who may have experienced a lot of their journey in predominantly white spaces that they don’t need to figure these things out overnight. there’s a lot to sort through and try to understand. i can now grapple with the reality that there is a brokenness regarding what has been done to me. we are grappling with these inconsistencies in faith. there can often be the sense that the person of color must carry the burden and weight.
it’s not that accepting forgiveness or offering the olive branch can never happen, but we have to work towards deconstructing the ideas that may be our intrinsic and evangelical faith. then we can allow ourselves to get to that point, or perhaps get to another point where we speak truth to power or act differently, indicating this is wrong. i grew up in an evangelical church, and i think there’s often a significant component of just forgiving people. i think we miss some very huge steps when we automatically jump to forgiveness. we can’t always have a call to unity if unity involves oppression or dehumanization. we can’t jump there if we’re not addressing some of these earlier things. the rhetoric is that the person of color should jump to unity and, as a result, absorb some of the oppression. i think that’s fundamentally wrong.
SPIRITUAL CARE
what has embracing both the brokenness and beauty of your experiences that shaped your identity taught you about God?
i have been engaging with this this year, and it has served me well. through the events we’ve experienced and with issues of racial justice bubbling up, i felt an invitation to engage more attentively with grief and sorrow—this idea of holding the good and the bad. i have found creating space to grieve losses i rarely create space for has been helpful because i often default to a sense of wanting to bounce back and find joy and see the beauty in things. holding that tension of beauty and brokenness and engaging with grief means not shying away from the broken elements. there is a great deal of brokenness that exists, and sometimes the invitation is for us to grieve what we have lost, grieve the sorrows we experience, and acknowledge them. for me, that has proven to be very useful in working through some challenging moments i’ve been experiencing lately and allowing myself to be present in that. i’m a person who’s very optimistic and very joyful, and so this is moving against my bent to do that. i also recognize that there are plenty of people out there whose natural inclination is towards grief and sorrow. if that’s the case, i think it may not be the same invitation. but i believe it can help us acknowledge that there can be goodness in both of the emotions that we experience in the situation even if they might oppose one another. but i don’t think they’re competing. they’re just two sides of an experience.
to have written some of these stories was part of my engagement with loss and grief. it was the manifestation of that. this journey of thinking about grief has helped me to examine what might be bubbling up in my soul and look at it, consider it, and feel it. this is important for me as a writer, to examine it, feel it, and not feel like i have to write about it because sometimes we think our stories are always for public consumption. i don’t believe that’s always the case. that’s also been part of my journey.
as someone who finds storytelling to be an influential act, how would you explain the importance and power of having a diverse representation of stories within a church?
to me, this is where the importance of creating spaces for authentically sharing stories matters. when i think about my book, i think of it as a collection of essays about my particular experience. it is my offering of a story to the world, another experience for people to consider in the same vein that i think it’s important for me to consider others’ experiences. especially for people who have existed in spaces where everyone is like them and in spaces where they hold power in society and create what stories are heard. i think it’s vitally important that there’s a sense of listening to an abundance of stories. my hope with my book is that it doesn’t just stop with my experience. it will encourage people to seek other experiences that they maybe don’t know as much about or haven’t thought about before, and the abundance of stories will help to add greater robustness. i think people can easily exist in their own comfortable space and never think about what it might be like for another person.
PHYSICAL CARE
what advice would you give women trying to cultivate self-love and embrace their physicality?
at this point in my life, i feel very grateful that i truly delight in who i am and who God created me to be, and the physical body i inhabit. even the mental space i inhabit—all these parts of who i am. but one thing that’s very interesting about raising daughters and i imagine just raising the next generation, is the sense that i have this deep desire to pour into them things that it took me many years to learn on my own. so that is present in their own story, yet, there’s this piece of me that also must grapple and recognize that they are another human being on their own journey. i want to pour into them these truths that i have learned, but i must also come alongside them and support them in their particular journey because they’re not living my exact story, and they’re not a replica of me.
at the same time, there are similarities, and there can often be this desire to find the similarities and connect on those. still, part of offering dignity to other human beings is to recognize how our experiences differ and make space for the ways our experiences differ from one another. we can share stories and speak into experiences as we see these similarities, but we have to be careful that we don’t detract from the reality of the actual differences that make us human. i think all these pieces are part of our journey and our story. the reality of us functioning within our societies can often heighten some aspects of our journeys and stories. we are not just living in isolation, we are part of the world we live in.
how have you learned to reconcile situations where people make uncomfortable references to your blackness?
there’s a book i like, called i bring the voices of my people, by dr. chanequa walker-barnes. it offers a breath of fresh air to this discussion that has often been centered on individual interactions like friendship and bridge-building. one thing she talks about is the need for confrontational truth-telling and that we speak truth to situations of injustice. as i reflect on past experiences where people made unacceptable comments to me, i hope i can now express confrontational truth-telling. i won’t just ignore it and just sit with it. but sometimes you’re just weary of always needing to say something, always needing to do something. another aspect that’s important in this journey is to care for our souls too. i have recently felt this prompt, like the Holy Spirit prompting me to rest, resting from the need to explain or defend myself. people will go through various seasons of how they engage. i think it is essential that you are, in some capacity, having outlets in which you can be authentic as you engage in issues of injustice.
SELF-CARE
what advice would you give women who are bombarded with the world’s idea of certainty and have a hard time embracing and normalizing the process of self-discovery?
i feel like the journey is never really done. there can be seasons where what’s happening is so significant, and then at other points, it’s these other minor adjustments that you’re making. but there’s always this continued movement towards our true selves. that’s something i’ve been thinking about a lot lately—the idea of our true selves and moving toward our most authentic selves. that’s a journey over a lifetime. God extends us an invitation towards that, and we can choose to engage. it’s a beautiful thing as we ultimately head towards our most authentic selves.
i heard a quote, i can’t remember how it went, but they talked about this idea that we thrive on mastery in our culture. we struggle with mystery. we want certainty. we want to know things. we want to have it figured out and to exist in a space where you’re between things and you know something is shifting and changing, but you haven’t arrived and you may never arrive is difficult. in our american culture, and maybe many western cultures, we don’t do well with that. it can honestly leave people with a sense of failure when there’s no reason to feel that way. it’s almost as though we create these standards for pursuing certainty and pursuing mastery, and the absence of that can leave us feeling as though we are lacking or something is wrong. this is one thing that i love about writing essays, and i love about telling some of these stories. i love to leave them open. i rarely will wrap anything up nicely at the end of an essay. there’s a sense of just leaving it open because this is life, and there is much that i am still figuring out. i also want to leave the reader with a sense of the story continuing. that’s something that i appreciate and want to convey even in the structure of how i write. there is some mysterious component to what all is happening here in our lives that can’t be just figured out and solved. there is a mystery to life. part of our movement towards our authentic selves is embracing the unknown. if we are people who always need answers, if we need everything sorted out before we can step forward, we will miss out on the beauty of what is mysterious. it can’t be reduced to perfect understanding.
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*this conversation is about how to connect with others.
