I didn't *actually* officially go bankrupt, but I did end up in huge debt which took me years to clear.
I had my own company with 8 employees. We had a downturn. Stupidly, I increased the overdraft with the bank secured on my home and tried to keep the business going. For almost 2 years I took nothing out of the business but lived on what we'd put by, and kept all the employees on, hoping for an improvement. It never happened and eventually I had to close the company and triple my mortgage to cover the secure overdraft on the business.
Then I worked out of my spare bedroom for 2 years, barely keeping head above water, but the bank tried to force me to change my *personal* overdraft to a loan at much less favourable rates. I had a big argument with the manager who I accused (correctly) of not wanting to help me, but purely to meet her quarterly target for selling loans. There's a long story to follow, but out of spite the bank got a Court Judgement against me for the overdraft. They didn't need to...I paid off the balance 3 days after the Judgement, but the bank had been inflexible about delaying the case.
Upshot (and this was deliberate from the bank manager) was that my credit rating was destroyed, my credit cards were, one after the other, called in and cancelled, I wasn't able to get normal credit anywhere, could only get a "cash account" at a bank and the only credit card I could obtain was for a very low limit at a very high interest.
For 4 years after that we lived hand to mouth. Almost no social life. Minimal spending on anything. No new clothes. Shopping the hour before the supermarket closed to get the items that were going out of date at a big discount, etc. I had to sell almost all of the optical instruemnts I'd collected over the previous 20 years, and most of the old books I'd collected, sometimes literally so that I could put fuel in the car to visit a client, and a couple of times to make sure we paid *something* off the mortgage. Rebuilding a business with no loans or overdraft and expanding purely using profits was a struggle.
BUT, two years ago my co-shareholders and I sold out our carefully built new business to a multinational. As the smallest shareholder, I didn't make a mint of money, but I made enough to put us approximately back in the position we'd been in before the first company went down.
It took 6 years after the first company collapse to get to the point where we could, eg, go out for a meal in a restaurant, or take a vacation. In the first 4 years I had a total of 16 days holiday (that's over 4 years, not per year) and worked most weekends. BUT..........WE GOT BACK ON OUT FEET, which is the whole moral of this story.
The months after my first company collapsed I was in total despair. I just didn't see how we were ever going to get out of the situation. It was the blackest period of my life. I felt like giving up several times, BUT WE CAME THROUGH IT.
So don't give up, don't EVER give up...you CAN and WILL rebuild your life! Good luck!