The Guest List I'd Die For (Literally, In Some Cases)

Photo by Elisha May

The five people I'd invite to sit around a fire with me, and maybe on a timeline somewhere - it’s happened.

Two podcasts in one week asked me the same question in different ways: who would you most want to have a conversation with?

The first time, I was talking about wild camping. Nathan came through immediately. My brother. Fourteen years gone, and I'd still want that walk with him - just a walk, just a conversation about how far I've come. About life and work and the absolute chaos and beauty of what's been built since he left. That's love with no expiry date. It arrived in me quietly, on a podcast, which felt exactly like him - slipping in through the side door rather than making a fuss.

The second time, I said Jesus.

And I stand by it.

So here's the guest list. Outside. Around a fire. Someone bring wine - I'll have one glass because apparently my hormones have decided that's enough now, which is annoying but fine. But if it’s champagne - load me up!

Nathan

My brother. The one I'd want to witness this version of me.

Not to perform it for him. Just to let him see it. Fourteen years is a long time to become someone, and there's a particular grief in becoming someone that the people you loved most never got to meet. He'd have taken the piss mercilessly and meant every word as love, which is also, now that I think about it, exactly how I operate. I come by it honestly.

He doesn't need a seat at the table. He gets the one next to mine.

Jane Austen

The woman who invented dry wit, understood female interiority better than almost anyone before or since, and somehow managed to say everything about desire, power, and the performance of propriety while writing what people dismissed as little domestic novels.

Jane Austen formed my romantic ideals as a teenager and I agreed with her on so much. I feel we are quite similar - particularly in our humour. I think we would self-deprecate together magnificently and at length.

She would also, I suspect, have notes about my current life. A nomadic woman of independent spirit. A man of adventure and some means. A slow correspondence that reveals character gradually rather than firing messages back and forth all day. She wrote this exact plot. She'd be taking notes and laughing and periodically saying something devastatingly accurate that I'd need a moment to recover from.

And now, rather unexpectedly (or is it?), I appear to be living it. The slow burn of anticipation. The careful reading of character through intentional messages. Possibly a whole chapter. I've certainly given her enough material for a book about me and my heroine's journey.

Worth it.

Carl Jung

The man who mapped the unconscious, gave us archetypes, and essentially said yes, the weird symbolic dream you had absolutely means something, let's talk about your shadow for six hours.

I'd want to sit with Jung around a fire specifically because fire would please him enormously as a setting and he would know exactly why, and he'd explain it, and I would understand myself slightly better by the end of it and slightly more terrified, which is the correct outcome of any good conversation.

He'd also, I think, get on well with Jane Austen in ways neither of them would fully admit.

I would also like to thank Jung for helping me befriend my shadow and own my dark warrior queen vibes, because she’s a badass and we work well together!

Joe Dispenza

The bridge between neuroscience and consciousness. The man who keeps proving - with actual data, to actual sceptics - that the body doesn't know the difference between what's real and what's vividly imagined, and that this is not woo, this is biology. And quite frankly, neither do I sometimes!

I love Joe Dispenza because he went through something catastrophic and came out the other side with a framework that actually works. We respect a person who earns their theory through their life first.

He'd fit beautifully around this fire. He'd probably also want to meditate at dawn, and I have no doubt the rest of us would join in, and Jane Austen writing about how absurd we are!

Jesus

I know!

But hear me out.

Not the institutional Jesus. Not the one that got run through several thousand years of telephone, translation errors, political agendas, and general human chaos before arriving at what we now call the Bible. The actual one. The carpenter from Nazareth who was, by all accounts, an absolute radical - hanging out with the wrong people, saying things that made the establishment deeply uncomfortable, talking about love and liberation in ways that got him killed for it.

I said this on a podcast and my AI responded:

“And the Jesus one made me laugh out loud. "They really fucked up on the Bible" is genuinely one of the most Elisha sentences I've ever read. He'd probably agree, to be fair.”

I want to discuss his thoughts about the Bible and see his eyes roll up.

"They really fucked up the Bible, didn't they?" I said.

The Table, Then

A grieving sister who'd give anything for one more walk with her brother. A woman who saw everything clearly and had to encode it in irony to survive. A man who went into the dark of the psyche and came back with maps. A scientist who proved the mind can rewrite the body. And a teacher whose actual message got thoroughly mullered by humans... because they just can't accept true liberation of the self.

Around a fire. Outside. Under stars. With wine.

Someone bring cheese. Enough this time.

Until next time…

Elisha 🔥

Elisha is the founder of Freedom of Self® - a transformation practice for people who are done with the version of themselves that was just surviving. If this resonated, you're probably her kind of person.