I am pretty ego-centric. I am occaisionally arrogant (just look at my Nohari and I know that you guys all know that!) and sometimes I forget how other people see things, empathy is so not my middle name.
The idea that someone read my fiction and didn’t think twice about assuming it was a real journal took me by surprise. Yes, I take real things, mostly images or ideas and then my imagination kaleidoscopes over them and I express other things via those images or ideas. I hope that no one is reading my prose hoping to gain some sort of insight into my life (my poetry might be a bit better for that), and more to the point I hope no one is looking at that prose and thinking; ‘oh well that ones me, and that ones her and we never did that, how dare Mish say that we did!’ If you want a fictionalised account of my time in Lancaster with all my friends in then ask me because it is out there. I just don’t publicise it.
My lack of empathy really worries me at times. That I make people uncomfortable without noticing or realising in time has resulted in the loss of five friends over the last eight years (three of them came back though!) and it concerns me that I am going to take my teasing, or my sense of whats ok to say in public and whats not, too far and lose another friend. I don’t ever want to stop being a Mish because I get on pretty well with me, but that lack of common sense does bother me. My lack of ability to make other people feel ok around me really bothers me and I wish I knew when to stop, I really do.