No one can ignore the potential of holding Bitcoin, but holding is very difficult for everyone. Because not everyone has the patience to hold for a long time. I have taken the challenge of holding Bitcoin many times but could not implement it. I sold Bitcoin for an emergency or out of fear.
From your experience, I can easily say you were not accumulating bitcoin, rather you only bought to hold and possibly you did it with funds meant for your expenses and not your discretionary income. I believe if you had a source of income and purchased bitcoin with discretionary income, you would not necessarily be afraid since it is not your main medium of survival, not to mention that you failed to build out your backup funds and ended up endangering your portfolio and in the event of emergencies, it got consumed. I also believe that if you had an accumulation target and were busy expanding your portfolio with discretionary income, then you would be more focused on the right thing which is continuous buying rather than focusing on the price which made you afraid and you sold all too soon.
People tend to make mistakes and learn from them, it takes a while to achieve maturity in your investment and accurate cashflow management practices, but you were making same mistakes repeatedly which resulted in not being able to have any much BTC, even after trying several times. I hope you are doing things differently now as a more matured bitcoin investor?