Coming home after living abroad is hard. It was even harder for me when I moved back into my childhood bedroom, staring down the barrel of my 30th birthday.

After two years of uprooting my entire existence and living in America, returning home felt like complete and utter failure.

Naturally, the universe decided to sprinkle a little extra salt on the wound by delivering a spectacularly timed breakup from my three-and-a-half-year relationship.

But one thing surprisingly hurt more than I ever imagined, one slightly uncomfortable truth, and that was knowing my friendships had completely and irreversibly shape-shifted without me.

I would later discover there was a name for what I was experiencing, but more on that later…

Charting the painful friendship shift.

When you live on the other side of the world, you are forced to watch through a screen as your friends collect promotions, navigate massive life changes, get engaged, and forge new, effortless friendships with people who actually share their postcode.

When you are wrestling with a brutal 17-hour time difference, communication gets a little scattered. Pinning down a FaceTime that doesn’t involve someone either rushing to work or falling asleep mid-sentence is a logistical nightmare.

And the honest, slightly uncomfortable truth is this: I was busy building a completely different life on the other side of the world, exactly while they were building theirs at home.

So, when I returned home a couple of months ago, and everyone was coupled up and had their routines and jobs, I didn’t quite know where I fit. I was different. My friends were different, too.

It wasn’t that anyone had done anything maliciously wrong; our relationships had changed.

When you live on the other side of the planet, the bar for being a good friend is practically on the floor. You are sustained by the low-stakes drip-feed of digital connection. An erratic FaceTime schedule, a reply to an Instagram story, and a panicked, hungover voice note left at 3:00 am your time are enough to make you feel cherished and deeply involved.

Sometimes I didn’t speak to some of my best friends for weeks or months, and I assumed that when I was physically home, it would be different.

The thing is, when you aren’t physically there, you don’t expect to be invited to the impromptu drinks or the mid-week coffee. You are exempt from the heavy lifting of day-to-day friendship — the plans, the time scheduled for uninterrupted yapping during a busy week.

But when you are suddenly 10 minutes down the road again, those expectations change.

I think for anyone who has lived abroad and returned home, you expect to be woven right back into the daily fabric of their lives. I know I have high expectations of my friends (something I am definitely working on!). But, it hurts when you expect to just press play on a friendship exactly where you paused it.

You assume you’ll still be part of the inner circle, only to come home and realise they’ve spent the last two years getting entirely comfortable with a long-distance dynamic that requires very little from them.

The truth about the ‘great scattering’.

The truth is, things never go back to exactly how they were before you left.

Mel Robbins’ calls this the “Great Scattering”, the reality that friendships naturally fracture and shift throughout our lives.

What’s interesting is that it doesn’t just happen after school. It keeps happening. So when someone in your friendship group gets married, that’s a scattering. When someone has kids, that’s a scattering.

Moving across the globe and back is, undoubtedly, a massive scattering. Years have passed, and you’ve both quietly grown into different versions of yourselves.

On a recent Mamamia Out Loud episode, Amelia Lester admitted she experienced her own “great scattering” when she too moved home.

“I moved back to Australia a bit over 18 months ago,” she told Mia Freedman. “It’s delightful to be in the same place as my friends, but it also challenges the friendships in ways that I hadn’t expected. You don’t expect so much from people when they’re living on the other side of the world or when they’re living in a different city. You can kind of keep up; we would send each other interesting articles and reply on our own schedules.”

Mia offered one brilliant piece of advice to navigate this.

“Don’t hold on too tight. Loosen your grip, but also you’ve got to put in effort,” Mia said.

Navigating the change.

Sometimes, the most grown-up thing you can do is accept that a friendship has changed its shape, and simply find a way to be okay with it.

As a chronic people pleaser (another delightful trait I’m actively trying to unlearn), my default setting has always been to swallow my feelings and desperately avoid conflict with friends.

Having already gone through messy friendship breakdowns in my early 20s, the mere thought of losing another close friend genuinely makes my stomach turn. Because of that fear from past friendships, my instinct has always been to choose a safe, comfortable silence (even when I am upset), over communicating when a friendship is feeling one-sided.

But if a friendship truly matters to you, if the thought of losing it feels worse than a breakup, and you simply can’t accept this new distance, you should always express your needs. It is by no means an easy conversation to initiate, but it is entirely possible to do it without sounding like you are putting them on trial.

You can look at the people you love, remind them how much they mean to you, and let them know you are feeling disconnected from the friendship, and you want to rebuild.

Most of the time, people are simply oblivious.

Caught up in the excitement of a new relationship or overwhelmed by work, they genuinely don’t realise how you’re feeling. If you want to save the friendship, the healthiest step you can take is to express your needs without blame. Chances are, they have no idea how disconnected you feel, or just how isolating the transition back home has been for you.

Settling back into life at home hasn’t been entirely seamless, but I am showing up for it. I am doing the rounds of coffee catch-ups and post-work drinks, sending the check-in texts, and doing the work to feel a part of my community again. I’m finding my way back to the friendships.

It isn’t easy, but it is so worth it.