Marylin,

I hope that someone will jump aboard with suggestions for healthy coping skills because my techniques of dealing with my fears, isolation, doesn't work well at all.

I've lost all of my family through either death or abandonment. Friends as well. I probably broke when my landlord made me give away my cat. I can't think of him without crying.

I'm afraid of so much and so many things. It would be simpler to name the few things that I don't fear than to enumerate those things that I do fear. One of my greatest, and maybe silliest, fears was dying alone. Of course I'm going to die alone. The longest that I could possibly go without being found is one week, though. But far worse is this living alone... I'm not exactly certain how I came to be so alone. My thought processes no longer work well enough to get from the seldom-lonely 1997 me to the always-lonely 2016 me.

It may be good that you're at a point of worrying about your potential fears and potential loneliness; maybe you can be saved from succumbing to them. If you allow yourself to get old and find that fear and loneliness are are your life, it may be too late.

I'm dull, dry and numb and not too energetic at the moment and, since my social fears are new to me and they've not been much of a topic of discussion in therapy, the only thing that I can even think to suggest trying is "exposure therapy." Start small – such as getting out your mower – and slowly work your way up to your greater fears.

I've been told that this works, just too far gone to try it myself.

Because I'm so entrenched in loneliness, I've never given much thought as to prevention. Or stopping it before overtakes. I think that you've actually found the balm for both fear and loneliness: love. It's far better than fear and I think that I may be at the start of having an understanding of what "self-love" means so I may be inching closer to understanding love over fear.

Love over loneliness seems obvious but I don't know how it would work in the real world. The more people that I lost the more that I withdrew because losing hurt. I wasn't willing to leave myself open to more hurt, wasn't willing to love again. So they started dropping off, one by one, and I kept going further and further into isolation until there was just Henry and me and Henry had to leave.

As you'll read in other messages here, you can get to a point where you don't feel worthy of anyone's attention, so it's difficult to be open to any new relationships. It's too late for me, but I think that I can advise that widening your circle of friends before these, quite natural, losses occur makes it easier to deal with loss that leads to abject loneliness. No one will replace your mother, of course, but the empathy and love of three friends can go a long way in soothing the pain.

Sorry that I'm so messed up myself that I can't offer any fast and hard suggestions. I think that if I had thought of and acted upon my suggestion in re loneliness that I may have been able to, at the least, have one or two remaining acquaintances.

This will sound trite, maybe sound as if I'm trying to organize my own little pity-party, but I don't want anyone to feel as bad as I feel. It's better to hurt for someone else than just for ones' self, though; makes me feel less selfish, I guess.

From the feelings that you've described, I think that you've caught the symptoms early enough to come out as a survivor.

That's a very, very good thing.