ot long ago, I wrote a note to an acquaintance.

It was late. I was exhausted. It seemed that nothing more could go wrong – although more than fifty years on this globe have taught me the truth of that comical old axiom: Things are always darkest before they go completely black.

I’d been put in collections – the first time this had ever happened in my life. Heartbroken, panicky and feeling as though the world was falling in, I confided everything.

I’ve been open, even public, about the extent of an investment theft we suffered last year. In fact, I hope to write about its effect on my family – an innocent and ordinary family. I’m not ashamed. My husband was duped. In retrospect, I should have gone into deep research mode, found out more, smelled a dozen rats. But they’re called “con” men because they inspire confidence. They didn’t promise my husband investment returns in double digits, only modest help protecting the money I’d saved from a lifetime of hard work.

That was four years ago.

No one had ever heard of Bernie Madoff. “Ponzi scheme” was not a household word. I didn’t understand enough about money. Few of us do. We read accounts of “instruments” and “short sales” and use these terms in this new finance-obsessed world, ashamed that we don’t entirely get it.

And we know that living in the world means living with some level of trust.

I hope that one day, I’ll trust in others again.

This time of coming to terms has damaged my spirit, trashed relationships, revealed parts of my personality I wish I’d never met. But I’ve learned (again) who my real friends are. And I’ve learned how people really respond to a problem that doesn’t come with ribbon to stick on a car window.

Some of them are not moved. They’re not even usually sympathetic. They’re embarrassed and they’re delighted, privately, because whatever else has happened to them, they avoided the quicksand pit in which you’re floundering.

A longtime friend said, “If you didn’t have so many kids, you could start over. You made your own bed. Don’t you dare complain.” At least, she was honest.

“Stop blatting,” wrote a man I considered a pal, not long ago. “You aren’t in a combat zone. You don’t have a terminal illness.”

But I have felt that I have a terminal illness, despair, that keeps me from the optimism I once knew. At times, I feel I am in a combat zone, struggling against my own weakness and the inexorable drip of bad luck. And nothing stirs the dark side of the human spirit more than someone down on her luck that doesn’t hide it.

We like people to present the kind of denial that may leave them hollow but which comforts others. We like people who don’t tell us they’re sick until we hear they’ve entered a hospice facility. We like marriages slapped with divorce decrees before even the kids know something was wrong. We like not just stiff, but truly rigid, upper lips. That line from an old pop song -- “You look so ugly when you cry” – is drawn from real human sentiment.

When the mighty are fallen, it makes all but the best people uncomfortable and the small-hearted feel mighty.

When I was widowed, someone wrote to me and said she thought of me like one of those weighted dolls that kids knock over – which pop right back up. “You’re a survivor,” she said. And that discharged her responsibility to me. Anointing me someone who’d make it on my own, she absolved herself of concern, although, years before, she’d leaned hard and heavily, accepting my concern, my gifts and my advice. The laws of karma may pertain, but often kindness is an arrow, not a boomerang.

Lately, I’ve felt crushed.

It’s true that I have asked -- only family and the closest friends who virtually are family -- for short-term loans to pay for my children’s track shoes, our first college graduate’s cap and gown and birthday gifts. I did it to get to the end of my novel without losing absolutely everything – the roof over my head. Some people offered without ever being asked, and their names are written in heaven.

The other night, when I wrote to that well-meaning woman, the illusion of the confessional conferred by the small, dark hours after midnight led me off a sensible course. I bemoaned my fate. I spoke of family matters. I made myself absurd.

The woman published the full text of my letter Non Facebook to try to get people to send money to me. And I think she also used it to make herself feel part of something urgent and important. But she did it with good heart.

I was humiliated. And yet, I got other notes. People said they were touched by my openness. They said it inspired them. They wished me peace, fair winds and someday, bliss. One man I thought was my enemy offered to help me financially.

Our lives get away from us at certain points.

Mine has.

As I complete my newest book, I’m starting to see the flickering of what might be daylight at the end of this long, long tunnel. It’s going to be difficult to get there.

But from this moment on, I’ll get there on my own – but I’m not going to hide. I’ll go there alone, with a little help from my friends. That includes those I’ve never seen.