Just over six years ago I went bankrupt.
It was one of the most terrifying things that has ever happened to me, and felt like falling into one of those pit traps set for wild animals in a forest.
It has often seemed like a money pit but in my moments of clearer vision I know that money is just the symptom of a crisis provoked by a belief of being worthless and a terror of being abandoned with no food and no place to live.
The terror was alive within me all my life, biding its time to manifest as something real.
Hovering like the Dementors in Harry Potter.
Beyond that terror, the crisis was about fear of becoming vulnerable and having to ask for help - which in itself was about fear of being punished beyond an endurable threshold of emotional pain, and re-experiencing the emotional punishment I was subjected to as a child.
So that is what it is all really about.
Money has nothing to do with it, which is hard to accept in those times when the pit seems inescapable.
To mix my metaphors, sometimes I equate getting out of the pit with trying to swim against a powerful rip tide when all you know how to do is doggy paddle and you are scared of water.
The thing is, you are swimming towards a giant prize, and there is nothing in the world that can make you give up on that.
The prize is freedom from persecution and abuse.
Freedom of speech, freedom to have a home, warm clothes, nourishing food, education and decent-paying work, back-up and support.
It is also freedom to have a meaningful life, career, relationships.
It is a Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs all in one, a Personal Constitution, a Bill of Rights.
The truth, I think, is that if all those rights were taken from you as a child, then as an adult you give them away because you do not know any better.
When you hit a crisis, no matter what, whether it is money, relationship or career, you are faced with the reality of how much you give away, how much you still believe the Rights are not yours.
That is when you start claiming them, probably for the first time in your life.
I wrote an article on a young American who had $27.
65 in his account, and was worrying how he was going to pay his utility bills; have his missing front teeth replaced; and repay the $1,000 he owed a friend.
The next day he had $285 million.
He won the lottery of course.
It seems like a fairy tale, and he certainly thought it was.
You can be sure some part of me felt a bit wistful, even though I knew that he probably does not have the tools to deal with what will come at him.
No doubt he has an interesting journey ahead of him.
Who knows what the money will do for him? I have known a lot of people who thought money was their problem who then inherited and it did not solve a thing.
Not a thing.
It is weird - the money had no power at all.
So it probably would not solve anything for me, which is the understatement of the century.
Better by far to be able to earn my own, and in truth that is what I really want.
That is what I am working towards.
So until it happens, I will keep on swimming against that rip tide, holding my head up above the water.
One day either the tide will turn or I will be such a darn good swimmer that I shall cut right through it.