If I had Six Months To Live – Harriet Horsfall

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER.

If I had six months to live, I would relive the year that I have had in double time. Every single one of the 12 months, the 356 days, I would do again, at twice the speed and twice the intensity.

I would relive the heart crushing, emotion-splattering break up with a damaging ex-girlfriend. The emotional growth and resilience was completely worth it, and I love the strong person and passionate, confident lover it has spat me out as.

I would take groups of young people into the developing world again, so they could challenge and push themselves in tough environments. Teaching young people how to do this is a threefold joy. The communities in Nepal and Cambodia benefit, the young people benefit, and my heart benefits from making it happen.

I would spend another house deposit on travelling simply to photograph people and places. I would beg, borrow, and steal the money if I had to. I would spend a week in cooking school in Laos. Consume bottles of wine in London. I would circumnavigate Iceland again in the middle of winter. I would don chadors and sit in Iran’s magnificent mosques for hours, days, fuck it… weeks. I would take more unauthorised portraits, chase the shots I wanted, fill double the memory cards, and never regret a moment paused to take just one more picture. I would let the Turkish men chase after me again for the laughs. Eat all the pizza and all the size 12 women’s shoes in America. Along the way, I would spend weeks with people I love, and meet new people who would enrich my life in ways I could only dream of.

I would make everything I was anxious about happen again; just to prove to myself that anxiety really is a beast of overthought uncertainty. I would run out of money faster. Become unemployed sooner. Break up quicker. Chase love interests harder. And as I took my last dose of antidepressants an accelerated 3 months, rather than 6 months into the ride, I would smile and laugh with such great power and joy that I was the one who was back in the manual, full throttle driver’s seat of my brain.

If I had six months to live, I would still take a punishingly difficult position advising an impossibly complex Evangelical community development organisation in Indonesia. I would cringe all over again at the Wi-Fi password “Jesus is coming”, I would sit through half as many one hour morning devotional sessions, I would have the same disputes with my colleagues, and take exactly the same actions. And I would leave that experience at the 2.5-month mark knowing that I was a stronger, funnier, more resilient person for it.

After Indonesia, I would come back to Australia. Walk into a Rhodes Scholarship interview at Government House knowing that I had created the best person I could possibly be. And get it. It wouldn’t matter that I might not be around to go to Oxford. The most important thing would be that I presented as someone with conviction, zest for life, and vision for whatever the short future might hold.

There’s an exhilarating satisfaction being 23, and creating the exact life I want. A life that makes me happy and thrilled to get up in the morning and go about my day. I hope I have much longer than six months to live, but the most important thing for me is to lead a life where I’m never waiting upon ‘one day’ to lift me out of an un-extraordinary life. One day is right now, and living life in the domain of the extraordinary is the only place to be.

Say hi to Harriet @HarrietHorsfall

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