Midway through the year of the Heenan scandal, Menken began crafting the image of a private self that existed beyond the celebrity image. Within her poetry she explored the idea of “seeming” and “being” and reflected on her confusion, disillusion, and pain at being unable to pull the two apart. Indeed, she made the conflict between performance and reality central to her celebrity. On February 10, 1861, she published the poem “Now and Then” as if to finally reveal the woman behind the masks of gaiety and scandal. The poem remained one of Menken's favorites, and years later she retitled it “Myself ” and included it in Infelicia. Her multiplicity of self is clearly visible in this poem: She is both the external Menken (constructed as the false self), and the internal Menken (the authentic self). The first two lines suggest that she has never had a strong hold on reality or understood her own identity: “Away down into the shadowy depths of the Real I once lived. I thought that to seem was to be.” She expresses loneliness and a sense of betrayal by the world at large: