God, it’s 2 AM again. Can't sleep, obviously. This thing with my high school friends… it’s actually starting to really bother me. Like, disproportionately so. And I don’t understand WHY it’s affecting me this much. I'm 22, I should be focused on my career, on establishing myself, on – you know – not letting my parents down after they sacrificed everything to get me here. But instead, I’m just… stuck. Replaying old group chats, wondering what happened. We were so tight, you know? Like, inseparable. Every weekend, every major life event, those guys were there. Now? Crickets. Most of them are in different cities for university, sure, but a text takes two seconds. A call? Five minutes. Am I being pathologically needy, or is this a legitimate decline in social connection? I genuinely can't tell if it’s me or them. I just found out through a story – an Instagram STORY, mind you – that three of them, the ones who live furthest apart, actually organized a whole weekend trip. Road trip. Like we used to do. And I wasn’t invited. No mention. Just pictures of them laughing, hiking, doing all the stuff we swore we'd keep doing. And the immediate cognitive response was this deep, almost somatic sense of abandonment. Like a punch to the gut. Which is insane, right? I have *actual* adult problems. I have family back home I need to support. My cousin just got engaged and my mom is already stressing me about finding a partner, making sure I don’t bring shame to the family name by being "too independent." Like THAT’S the real pressure. Not some stupid friend group from high school. But it still… it *hurts*. And I’m trying to rationalize it away, trying to tell myself it's just a developmental stage, a natural dissolution of adolescent bonds. But the pain doesn't care about my rationalizations. Anyone else feel this? This almost obsessive need to understand why people just… vanish? Not even a slow fade sometimes, just gone. Like I’m searching for a diagnostic explanation for why I’m suddenly feeling so… isolated. Is it cultural? Am I just not as good at maintaining these long-distance connections as my peers? Or am I just perceiving their connection as stronger than it is? Am I the only one who feels this existential dread about friendships just evaporating? It’s not just the sadness, it’s the profound confusion. Like, did I DO something? Was there a breach of some unspoken contract? Or is this just… how it is now? Forever? God.