How do you deal with grief of growing older?

I’m 22 and I genuinely feel like I’m grieving a life that doesn’t even exist anymore.

I know how dramatic that sounds, especially because I know 22 is still so young. That’s almost what makes it worse. I feel like I’m “too young” to be feeling this way.
Nothing is actually wrong with my life. I have amazing parents, an amazing family, and really good friends. The problem isn’t that I’ve lost those people…it’s that everything has changed.

Even four years ago, life felt completely different. In high school and even the first couple years after, weekends were just… friends. We’d hang out spontaneously, spend entire summer days together. Now it takes weeks just to get everyone together for one night.

Almost all of my friends are in serious relationships. They absolutely still make time for me, and I don’t resent them at all. It’s just different. Tonight is Saturday night and I’m sitting at home because they’re with their boyfriends, and that’s completely normal. That’s what people do. But it makes me realize how much life has shifted.

I think summer makes it ten times worse because it’s such a nostalgic season. Everywhere I look reminds me of being a kid or a teenager. It feels like every summer day used to be an adventure, and now I blink and it’s Saturday night after a ten hour shift, and I’m at home wondering where the time went.

It’s not just my friends either. I feel like I’m grieving my childhood as a whole. My parents are older. My extended family is older. Even my cousins, who were like my best friends, and I have different relationships now. We all have our own lives.

I’ve just graduated college, and it feels like I’m closing the biggest chapter of my life. Everything before this feels like one life, and everything after feels like another. It’s almost like the person I used to be and the world I grew up in don’t exist anymore.

I think what’s making it worse is that people around me are getting sick younger than I ever imagined. There are multiple people in my own circle in their 30s dealing with late-stage cancer, and it honestly scares me. It makes the future feel less exciting and more… fragile. Like life is moving so fast, and everyone is getting older, and I can’t stop it.

The best way I can describe it is that it feels like grief. Not because someone died, but because a version of my life did. Sometimes it honestly feels like I’m mourning my own childhood.

How do people actually accept that life changes this much? Does this feeling eventually fade, or do you just get used to it?