Veritas: A Reckoning of Self

What it means to live through a thousand deaths – and find yourself in the in-between.

This was written in the quiet space between grief and reclamation. For the parts of me I abandoned to survive, and for those still searching for themselves in the dark – I see you.

There exists a betrayal more profound than any inflicted by another – the quiet desertion of oneself. It does not arrive in grand moments of treachery, but in silence. In the thousand small compromises made in the name of survival. In the slow erosion of self, until what remains is unrecognizable.

I have lived that betrayal. I have worn its weight, spoken its language, drowned in its silence. I have stood at the threshold of my existence and asked a question I no longer feared the answer to:

Who am I?

For much of my life, the answer has been fluid – shaped by hardship, sculpted by survival, and rewritten by necessity. But I have come to understand that something endured beneath every loss, wound, and moment I believed I had been shattered beyond repair.

There was me.

At nineteen, I inked “truth” – veritas – onto my skin, long before I understood the war it would take to live by it. I traced stars down my neck, meant to be accompanied by – ad astra per aspera – “to the stars, through hardship.” The phrase is symbolically unfinished, much like my understanding of what it meant.

But now, as I stand midway upon the journey of my life, perhaps it is time to complete it. Perhaps now, with Dante’s words, I inscribe not just my body but my soul.

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita.

Because here I stand – between what I was and what I am yet to become.

What Started With A Childhood of Fractures

My father, whom I once revered, waged war against himself long before he vanished. Addiction devoured him, and though his love was real, it was never reliable. I waited for him. Always waiting. But hope is cruel when built on the shifting sands of someone else’s destruction.

My mother, in contrast, was steel – unyielding and relentless. She worked and provided, but tenderness was not among her offerings. She never held me close, but she kept me alive. And when she finally allowed herself to love, fate did what it does best. It took.

The first man to show me true paternal love was not my father. He was my mother’s love and claimed me as his own. He gave me something I did not know I had been starving for – affection without condition. And then, cancer stole him, and with his death, my mother unravelled.

Grief hollowed her out, leaving her skeletal and absent. I lost her too – not to death, but to sorrow.

School was no salvation. I was discarded, placed in a corner, and treated as a problem to be contained. No one knew or noticed that I simply could not see. When I was finally given glasses, the world sharpened into focus, and in that clarity, I found my first escape – an unconventional first love. Books.

I read with an insatiable hunger, devouring words as if they could stitch together the fractures of my life. The Giver, The Wringer, A Wrinkle in Time. And later, I sought the weight of more significant works – The Prince, The Symposium, A Critique of Pure Reason, War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, The Master and Margarita, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Infidel, Cry the Beloved Country, The Alchemist, Meditations, Hills Like White Elephants, The Poisonwood Bible, The Divine Comedy.

I learned that words could be both sword and sanctuary, that knowledge could be both escape and revolution.

There Came My Own Unraveling

High school was an awakening. It stripped away the remnants of childhood, exposing the raw, unfiltered truths of the world. I drifted through those years high, reckless, untethered. My self-destruction should have sealed my fate.

And yet, some saw beyond it. A summer school teacher who refused to let me drown in my own mistakes. A high school sweetheart taught me about love and loss in the same breath. He was shot one Halloween night in our tenth-grade year. He survived, but something in him never returned. And something in me never did either.

And then there was another love. He pulled me into a world I did not yet understand – a world of invisible cages, streets that did not forgive, names whispered in fear, and battles fought in silence. He was marked as a leader in a war that had no victors. And when the police came, when the weight of his choices left him with two options – prison or disappearance – he chose to vanish.

But I remained. And in his absence, I became a target. A name on a list. A girl who knew too much.

Death threats came.

Who am I?

What have I become?

A toolbox of masks and facades, I became a shapeshifter.

A Life Had Been Stolen, A Love Lost

Somewhere amid survival, fate wove another love into my story. We met in the chaos of the city, in the places where the past lingers like smoke. But the night that changed everything was not his story – it was a true friend.

This friend embodied warmth. He refused to let me be alone on a Thanksgiving night; he took me in with a kindness I had not known before. And hours later, he was dead – a gunshot to the head. The lover I had found took a bullet, trying to protect him. I stood there, frozen, the world shattering around me.

I moved through the aftermath in a daze. Grief came slowly, seeping into my bones, turning me to stone.

But eventually, I woke up.

I clawed my way back into school, graduated with honours, and earned a scholarship to the University of Toronto for artificial intelligence. I had finally built something resembling a future.

And yet, the past refused to loosen its grip. My lover confessed that our meeting had never been accidental. He had been sent to find me – to erase the last remnants of my past love’s story.

But he hadn’t. He couldn’t.

And in that choice, a different story was written.

That Breaking Led to a Becoming

University should have been my redemption. Instead, it became my exile. My family did not celebrate my success; they resented it. They told me I did not deserve it, that I was meant for nothing, nothing more than a grocery clerk.

Money ran out. Support was nonexistent. And so, I fell – into the arms of a man who did not love me, only controlled me. Pregnancy was not a choice. He drove me to the clinic, and a life was erased before I had time to grieve it. It hollowed me out. But still, I stayed.

Until I didn’t.

I ran. I rebuilt. I survived.

Again and again and again.

And With That Came My Reckoning

I became a mother, and in my daughter’s eyes, I found my unbroken reflection. I built a business and carved out a space where I had power, choice, and freedom. I took back control. I reclaimed my voice.

And then, love bloomed in my garden once more – a new love in a new life. He loved me for my strength, my mind, and my fire. We built a life together. We created our son.

But love does not erase pain. And sometimes, the people we love wound us in ways we never imagined.

He hurt me. And for the first time in a long time, I was afraid.

Veritas: The Nepantla

I have lived a thousand lives within this one. I have worn a thousand faces and survived a thousand deaths.

But I am still here.

I exist in the nepantla – the space between worlds, the threshold where the past and future blur, where I am neither who I was nor who I will become. The in-between. The liminal space between chaos and calm, between what was and is yet to be. Suspended between uncertainty and familiarity. The language of transformation, the sacred rupture that births something new. It is where pain becomes wisdom, where loss becomes expansion, where I stand poised between surrender and rebirth. It is the place of becoming.

As a freed prisoner from the shadows dancing on the wall, sitting in the glow of my own deceptions, in the narratives of different lives woven into my fabric of being, I am a true Pygmalion.

People look at me and see only the surface – an educated woman, polished, composed. They do not see the scars, the ghosts that walk beside me, the wars I have waged within myself.

But I know.

I remember.

And I refuse to forget.

I am the sum of every battle. I am the echo of every loss. I am the truth, carved into flesh, written into history, reclaimed in blood and fire.

Because no betrayal is greater than the one that steals you from yourself.

And no victory is more remarkable than finding your way home.

To yourself.

To veritas.

If this spoke to you – if you’ve ever had to rebuild from the ashes of your own forgetting – I’d love to hear your story. You can reach me or support my work at ko-fi.com/abreeze Or join me with future posts.

Amanda Breeze is a writer, mother, and survivor who reclaims the sacred spaces between pain and power through language. Her work charts the fractured pathways of identity, loss, and truth. You can support her voice at ko-fi.com/abreeze Or join her on Medium