The library › Belonging
You will be read as different before you open your mouth. The returnees who settle are not the ones who blend in best, they are the ones who stopped auditioning.
Nobody plans for this part. People plan the house, the school and the shipping, and then find that the thing which decides whether they stay is whether they made three real friends in the first year.
Before you say anything, you will be read. The way you queue. The way you handle a price that is obviously for you rather than for the person ahead of you. Whether you say sorry when someone bumps into you. What you do with your hands at a gate.
The accent finishes the job, and there is nothing you can do about the accent.
There is a word for you already: IJGB, I Just Got Back. It is affectionate from friends and less affectionate from strangers, and it is applied to anyone who signals, usually without meaning to, that they have been away and have opinions about how things are done here.
You cannot avoid the label. You can decide what you do with it.
Not the accent. People are relaxed about accents.
It is comparison. Out loud, repeatedly, unfavourably. "In Toronto this would take ten minutes." "The queue system in the UK is just better." Every one of those is probably true and every one lands as a small insult to the person standing next to you who has been managing this their whole life without the option of leaving.
It is also impatience presented as standards. Frustration is fair. Announcing your frustration as though nobody around you had noticed the problem is what makes people close their faces.
The correction is not silence. It is asking rather than telling. "How do people usually handle this?" gets you the answer, the shortcut, and the person. "This is ridiculous" gets you a polite nod and a wide berth.
This is the quiet grief of coming back and nobody warns you.
Fifteen years happened to them too. They have children you have never met, jobs you do not understand, a Saturday routine with people you do not know. The friendship you are returning to is a memory you both share, which is a lovely thing and not the same as a current friendship.
Some will pick straight back up. Treasure those and do not assume there will be many.
Some will have moved somewhere you cannot follow, and that is nobody's failure.
And some, this is the one that stings, will now see you primarily as a resource. School fees, a visa reference, capital for an idea, a contact abroad. It is not always cynical. You did leave and come back with something, and the asymmetry is real. But you will feel the difference between someone glad you are home and someone glad you are available, and you should trust that feeling.
Adult friendship needs repetition and a shared reason to be in the same place. Here that means, in rough order of usefulness:
The school gate, if you have children. It is the single most reliable source of adult friendship for returning families, and it happens whether you cultivate it or not.
Your church or mosque, if you have one. Enormously effective, and it is worth being honest with yourself about whether you are joining for faith or for community, because both are legitimate and people can tell.
Your estate or street. Nigerian neighbourliness is real and it works on presence. Being seen, greeting people, being the person who is around.
Something you do repeatedly and badly. A gym, a running club, a language class, a five-a-side game, a choir. Shared incompetence at a fixed time each week builds friendship faster than any amount of networking.
Work, if you work locally. Much harder if you work remotely for a foreign employer, which is worth knowing in advance, because remote workers are the group most likely to arrive and find themselves lonely in a country full of their own people.
The returnee bubble. It is possible to move back to Lagos and construct a social life composed entirely of other people who also just got back, comparing notes about how hard everything is. It is comfortable and it is a slow poison. You have emigrated to your own country. Some of this is fine and even necessary, because those people understand a specific dislocation nobody else does. All of it is a problem.
Performing localness. The opposite error. Flattening your accent, pretending you do not find some things difficult, laughing along at the version of you being mocked. People see through it and it reads as insecurity rather than humility. You did live abroad for fifteen years. That happened. Own it lightly.
Harder, with fewer tools, and they cannot leave the situation at five o'clock.
Expect a rough first term. Expect them to be teased for exactly the thing you are being teased for, and to have less capacity to shrug it off. Expect some regression, some clinginess, some anger pointed at you, because you are the person who did this to them.
Then expect it to resolve faster than yours does, usually by the second term, because children have the enormous advantage of being thrown together daily and forced to work it out.
Give it time, do not interrogate them nightly about whether they are happy, and get them into something local and physical outside school as fast as you can.
It is not the day you stop being noticed. That day may not come.
It is the day someone calls you about their problem rather than your money. It is knowing which trader to go to and being known there. It is having somewhere to be on a Saturday that nobody organised for you. It is realising you have stopped narrating the differences, out loud or internally, because they have become ordinary.
For most people that takes about a year. Less if you have children in school, more if you work remotely and stay indoors.
Be useful before you are interesting.
The returnees who land well are the ones who show up. Who contribute to the estate thing, who help the neighbour's son with a university application, who turn up to the burial. Not performatively, not with money, with presence.
Community here is built on showing up, and it is measured over years. The good news is that it starts counting from the day you arrive, and nobody is checking your accent while you are doing it.
Coming back is not only a logistics problem. If the social side is what worries you most, say so when you get in touch. It is a more common answer than you would think.