Isaiah_Semon

Isaiah Semon: On Love, L'Ancienne-Lorette, and the Maps We Draw So, you want to know who I am? I’m Isaiah. Born and raised in L'Ancienne-Lorette, Quebec. Still here, actually. Most people my age bolted for the city lights of Quebec City proper, but I stayed. I’m a sexologist, a researcher, a writer. I’ve spent the last fifteen years knee-deep in the messy, beautiful, and often confusing world of human connection. Sexuality, relationships, the way money twists around our intimate lives, the digital chaos of dating apps — that’s my beat. I’ve lived it, studied it, and now I write about it, mostly from my kitchen table overlooking the parc de la Seigneurie.November 17th, 1988. I came into the world at l'Hôpital Saint-François d'Assise, over in Quebec City. But my parents whisked me back home to L'Ancienne-Lorette almost immediately. Our place was a modest duplex on Rue Notre-Dame, not far from the old church. I remember the winters being brutal, the snowdrifts piled high enough to block the view of the river from the top floor. My mother, a nurse, says the night I was born was clear and bitterly cold. The kind of cold where the snow squeaks under your boots. She always tells the story of my father rushing her to the hospital, sliding a little on the icy patch near the corner of Rue du Trésor. That's my first memory, not the event itself, but the story of it. A story anchored to a place, to the geography of home.Growing up here in the 90s was its own specific universe. We weren't cool like the kids in Sainte-Foy. We were a suburb, a close-knit one. My adolescence was a mix of hockey on the outdoor rink behind the school and, later, discovering the dial-up internet. I remember the sound. That horrible, beautiful screech. It opened a door, you know? Suddenly, the world was bigger than Rue Notre-Dame. I was a weird kid. Obsessed with why people did what they did. Why Stéphane Tremblay always picked on Marie-Claude. Why my own parents, who seemed so solid, had these quiet, tense moments over money. It fascinated me. And terrified me, honestly. I devoured books from the Bibliothèque de L'Ancienne-Lorette on the corner, anything on psychology, on human behaviour. My friends were skateboarding behind the Arena Michel-Bergeron; I was reading about attachment theory. It made me an outsider, sure. But it also gave me a lens.Look, talking about emotions isn’t exactly a guy’s strong suit in Quebec, or anywhere, probably. But here's the thing I've learned, and maybe it's what makes me good at my job: vulnerability isn't weakness. It's the only path to real connection. I’ve been the guy who couldn't commit, terrified of ending up in one of those silent, financially strained marriages I saw as a kid. And I’ve been the guy who fell too hard, too fast, confusing intensity for intimacy. My own romantic history? A series of field studies, some successful, some spectacular failures. I’ve been ghosted, breadcrumbed, and love-bombed before we even had words for it. I’ve had my heart stomped on by a woman from Sillery, and I’ve done my own share of stomping, which I’m not proud of. That experience, the good, the bad, and the ugly, it’s my real degree. It taught me that the theories in textbooks are just maps. You still have to walk the territory. And the territory is messy.My official work started small. I volunteered at a local youth centre near the Parc de l'Accueil, answering questions about sex and relationships from teenagers who were just as confused as I once was. That led to a gig with the CLSC, running workshops. We’d talk about consent, about STIs, about healthy relationships. But the conversation always, always drifted to money. How to split a bill on a date. The pressure to have a nice car, a nice apartment. The unspoken shame of student debt. It was all tangled up. For a while, I consulted for a few dating apps, trying to get them to think beyond swipes. It was... frustrating. They’re not in the business of connection; they're in the business of engagement. So I quit. Now, I write. My current project is with the folks at CamoWallet, writing articles about L'Ancienne-Lorette. But I’m not writing tourism brochures. I'm writing about how we live here. How the geography of a place shapes the geography of our relationships. How the quiet stability of a suburb like this affects the way we date, the way we pair up, the way we think about building a life with someone. It’s about putting my two worlds together, finally.Living in L'Ancienne-Lorette my whole life... people don't get it. They ask why I never left. But this city is in my bones. I can tell you the best time to walk along the Rivière Lorette, when the light hits the water just right behind the church. I know the shortcut from Rue de la Moselle to avoid the traffic on the boulevard. I’ve watched the city change, the new developments going in near the Aeroport de Quebec, the old farms slowly disappearing. But the core of it, the feeling, remains. It’s a place where you can’t hide. You see your ex at the grocery store on Boul. Notre-Dame. You run into your kindergarten teacher at the Quincaillerie. That sense of being known, of being held accountable by your environment, it forces a certain honesty. It’s a laboratory for human connection, this town. And I’m just documenting the results.