Struggling with loneliness for the first time in my life, at the moment. My core group of friends, whom I've known for 25+ years, all each had a kid in the space of a year. The pandemic made keeping those friendships alive difficult, but the kids turned it up a notch. I was gaslighting myself for a while that they were just busy, but when I heard about a couple of social things that I wasn't invited to, I realised that the friendships weren't on hold, they were hanging up. As an experiment, I stepped back and started to match the effort they were putting in and sadly I haven't spoken to some in months, some years. Working remotely, I need to make a real effort to maintain some social element in my life but having lost this core group of friends has been a huge blow; I have pretty regular dreams about it. Stoked to learn my brain is atrophying as a result!