You and your friends might all be in your 20s but it sounds like you’re at different life stages – try looking for gentler ways to reconnect with them

• Every week Annalisa Barbieri addresses a problem sent in by a reader

I’m in my early 20s and graduated from university in July 2023. I’ve been lucky enough to find a good job, which I have enjoyed, but after breaking up with my long-term partner in January I have been lonely. This hasn’t been helped by the fact that my friendship group seemingly never wants to do anything at the weekend.

We’re a group of young professionals who have known each other for more than 10 years, living in a busy city where there’s always something going on. Despite this, for the last three weekend nights I have been stuck in my room doing nothing, due to a range of excuses, like “I’m buying a wardrobe”, “I’m tired” or simply no reply at all. This is making me quite depressed.

Every week, Annalisa Barbieri addresses a personal problem sent in by a reader. If you would like advice from Annalisa, please send your problem to ask.annalisa@theguardian.com . Annalisa regrets she cannot enter into personal correspondence. Submissions are subject to our terms and conditions .

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The latest series of Annalisa’s podcast is available here .

What if there were geraniums? Yuck

Confronting my own mortality in my 30s, with silky skin and two young kids, was not something I was going to do lightly. And yet, heroically, I wrote my will .

Voluntarily instigating contact with lawyers turned my stomach enough to earn me at least a year of procrastination. Sure, you don’t want to unexpectedly die and leave your affairs in a shambles, but nor do you want to spend your precious time on Earth finding a lawyer and talking to them.

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Catie, 37, and Delia, 36, met in 2013 when they were trainee solicitors. They quickly became best friends

When Catie joined her local junior lawyers division, which helps young people in the legal profession to connect, she had no idea she would meet her best friend. “I was living in Leeds and had just moved in with my now husband,” she says. “I was training to be a solicitor and having a great time. But, as so many friends had moved to London, I was a bit at sea having to meet new people.”

In August 2013, she helped to arrange an event for the division on a canal boat. There, she met Delia, who was also living in Leeds and training as a solicitor. “I’d moved from Newcastle a couple of years before, but it still felt like a bit of a new start,” Delia says. “One of my goals was to get to know more people.” When she was invited on a “booze cruise”, she jumped at the chance. “It wasn’t as glamorous as they’d made out – more like a kid’s party with wine,” she says. “I remember lots of sausage rolls.”

We would like hear what fantasy memo you would write to your younger self

“Don’t you ever feel that you didn’t get the memo?” It’s a question Lauren Mechling asks in her feature on the essential advice she wished she had known when she was younger.

What if I had received marching orders that had warned me not to share my former therapist’s phone number with my close friend (who would, after a few sessions, realise that she couldn’t stand me and cease to be my close friend)? I really never got the memo.

It is the one essential piece of advice you wish you had known when you were younger. I started asking women for their memos – and the results were revealing

I can pinpoint the exact moment my fantasy flickered into life. It was a drizzly spring afternoon in 2019. I had just had an appointment at the eye doctor and found shelter from the rain at a tiny newsstand uptown. It happened to be around the corner from my first job, where I answered phones for a man who oversaw a newspaper, now long out of print. I was many jobs beyond that point, but still always on the phone, this time with my best friend. I wanted to chat with her for a few more minutes before I took the train home. The subject at hand: my college reunion, which was only a few weeks away, and for which I had yet to register.

The prospect of facing my fellow classmates was something I was having a hard time getting excited about. I had a lovely family, but I had recently been fired from my job at a magazine and I was struggling to make it as a freelance writer. As I stood there at that newsstand, my vision still recovering from dilation drops, all I could see was a blurry sea of magazine titles whose editors weren’t banging down my door – or responding to my emails.

It’s not easy to maintain the closeness of relationships of our youth but Abigail Dean will always make time for the friend she grew up with

In early 2006, when I was 17, I was admitted to a well-known psychiatric hospital in the UK, an institution most associated with models and footballers. I was neither. I was a schoolgirl who had suffered from either a chemical imbalance in the brain or a series of poor life decisions, depending on who you asked. For two months I was to live in a small pink room with immovable furniture, and attend every therapy on offer. I revised for my AS Levels in the communal lounge while people watched television or wept over the evening meal.

On my first day there, snow fell furiously across Derbyshire. My parents live on a big hill in a small village, and were snow-bound. Visiting hours inched around. I resigned myself to two hours of self-pity, listening to the hum of reunions from the surrounding rooms. But 30 minutes before the doors closed, in walked my friend, Ruth, who had got her driving licence just the month before. She was carrying a week’s supply of the worst gossip magazines of the late noughties and a craft kit for homemade cards. I would not spend the evening alone.

You are right to feel uncomfortable, rather than flattered, by such extreme imitation. Short of cutting her off completely, there are ways to gradually disentangle yourself

I met X about 10 years ago, at the gym. She’s not a very close friend, although I think she would like to be. For the first few years I thought we had so much in common – places we’d been on holidays as kids, our attitudes and our taste in music and clothes.

It has taken me a while to realise that I can’t believe anything she says . She copies everything I say or do . Every time I wear something new, she says: “I’ve been looking for a coat/dress/boots like that. Where did you get it?” She turns up a week later with almost exactly what I have. I simply don’t answer any more.