Or, the tentacles of friendship.

I’m obviously not really an octopus. But this analogy comes back to me again and again; the way my life has extended its reach around the globe because of the places I’ve lived and the people I’ve met there. I’m a shape shifting, appearance altering, intelligent creature who adapts to her environment, reaching for what she wants and stretching to hold on to it, squeezing herself into different situations and making it work. I’m an expat. I’m an octopus.

This adaptability manifests itself in so many ways. I’ve written before on finding my uniform when moving to a new place: the importance I feel in not only dressing to reflect my personality but also relating to the environment in which I find myself. Camouflage, to disguise myself when needed, helping me keep my head down and to pass as someone who either knows what they’re doing already or as a local when a location just feels like too much.

But this post isn’t about that. This one is about the friendships that now extend beyond my town and country of birth, and even beyond the places I’ve lived. Most people spend their lives knowing one place really well: the schools, the shops, the roads, the friends. This is their normal. Mine is… different. It’s still normal.

I have Dutch friends that I met in Malaysia, who recently stayed with us in Moscow. I have Irish friends I met in the Netherlands who stayed with us in Kuala Lumpur. Friends from Texas, the UK, Norway who now live in Oman, India, Singapore, all of whom I message regularly. I have friends who live in Canada, New Orleans, Tanzania, Borneo, New Zealand. Staying in touch with them isn’t the same as bumping into your mates down the pub, but it kind of is, for an expat. My tentacles of friendship stretch pretty much as far as this globe allows.

When I first left the Netherlands to move to Malaysia it was hard. (Honestly, if you’re going to quit your job to be a stay-at-home mum after working or studying for the best part of twenty years, I’d really recommend doing it in a location with more than three main roads and one adequate supermarket. But anyway.) But I can still remember the delight and novelty of a friend calling me from my old office to see how I was getting on. I raved about the warmth and the sunshine as I mooched around on the quiet white hot street which I now apparently called home. Until that point I would have given anything to return to grey Amsterdam, to regular diet coke and Dove chocolate bar breaks on the first floor with friends and life (validation) outside of motherhood and a gated compound. But that gesture of reconnection from my friend reinvigorated me, and I started to try to make the most of it. And that was just one call. Now, only a few years later, I can’t remember the last time I wasn’t in touch with someone from another country on a day-to-day basis, and every contact helps me feel connected to the lives and places I’ve lived.

There’s no doubt in my mind that the information revolution we’ve been privy to has allowed me – and other expats – to build and sustain these kind of long-distance relationships. It’s now so easy to contact people, or at least maintain the illusion of contact, that it takes little to no effort. There’s no way I’d write to these people (the Russian postal system is, as you say, challenging) but my phone screen lets me keep in touch, and oh so easily. But is it all an illusion? OK, so I probably couldn’t call on most of these people in a genuine life-changing emergency, but I can call on them. How do I know this? Because I have.

I’ve introduced an American friend I met in Borneo to an Australian friend I met in Moscow, who was moving to Germany. Another Moscow friend (British) who was relocating to Singapore was in contact with a Dutch person I knew from Malaysia. These meetings may not develop into a friendship or even beyond a vague acquaintance (and whether they do or not depends on them and the amount of wine available, and not my influence) but their tentacles, their friendship groups, have extended a little further. They now know someone who will share their already-won local knowledge, or share to their stories of where they’ve lived before and what they did there. Before we arrived Moscow I was passed the details of several people who currently or previously had lived here, and the information they gave me was invaluable. Expats don’t ask what you do, they ask you where you’ve lived. We like to see where your tentacles have been, if we have places and people in common… and so the cycle continues. Perhaps it is an illusion of friendship, but it’s still useful to everyone concerned. And, just sometimes, that casual contact can become something genuinely meaningful, in the same way that telephone call from an old friend was when I first went full expat.

I’m a big fan of award shows. (I keep meaning to write about how much I love my hidden shallows.) I’ve cancelled playdates to watch the Oscars, rerouted travel in Central America to stay in a motel that had cable so I could finally watch the ceremony in a decent time zone, and used to allocate entire mornings in Malaysia to watch it, with twitter and Instagram never more than a few inches away from my eager mitts. I can’t do this in Moscow. It’s not shown on TV and even if I live-streamed (which I can), the time zone totally sucks. But on Oscar morning this year I woke to multiple texts. From a Scottish friend in Texas, to a Dutch friend in Kuala Lumpur, to old British friend now back in the UK, they all reached out, acknowledging my Oscar indulgence. The fact that they remembered I love this stuff, took the time to contact me and actually could contact me, was brilliant. It’s the tentacles of friendship, extending to me, and it’s awesome.

The expat life can be hard and lonely, and just like an octopus you need a sharp mouth and a quick brain to be able to cope sometimes. So, thank you Tim Berners-Lee, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Hedy Lamarr and all the unnamed multitudes that have created the brilliant ways we have of reaching out and contacting each other. You’ve made this expat into an octopus, and a happy one at that.