Contradictions

I’ve always known who I am, I just wasn’t sure of myself.
Now I find that I have to rediscover it all.
It makes me wonder, now as always, if everyone has the same struggles behind their breezy composure.
When I knew who I was I loved to write. It was my escape; I could be my sick, twisted, dark self or my sickly sweet-good-as-gold self. Best of all

I could make you fall in love with me. You would call it a character; I knew it was a splinter of me. I could compel you to think deeply or snigger, you would be under my spell. When it wasn’t an escapist measure it was simply to express myself. Now I hide. Why am I so afraid? I’ve always been alone, so your companionship shouldn’t mean this much to me. But I still hide, unable...no, unwilling, to be vulnerable.
Now that I know who I am, I cannot write or create. My mind is fragmented, in conflict: constantly engaged in a battle with itself. I really need two vessels, for both sides of me are not in harmony. One calls me a hypocrite and the other finds me completely soulless. To tune out the bickering I try not to think but I do nothing but ponder my peculiar(?) problem.
In my mind I am accomplished, well-rehearsed, and together but outside it I am not lost, but I am unsure of where I’m going, indulging in destructive spontaneity. I have no time but I am nothing but idle.
This all makes sense, and yet it doesn’t. This quagmire that sucks me in, deeper each day. A rescue will be inevitable, but will it be a knight or a kindly maid, perhaps a motherly matron? Will anyone come at all? It’s possible that I might drown in this swamp of bewilderment. Only then will I discover if I am a phoenix. But my worry is that there is no all-consuming fire from which I can rise. I cannot even burn, merely sink, deeper, the filth suffocating me while I smile and laugh and let nothing on, holding it completely together.