Liam_McCaffrey

Liam McCaffrey: Sex, Science, and Settling Down in Vaudreuil-Dorion I'm Liam. Born in Alabama, but my accent's a weird hybrid now—too much time in Quebec. I used to study human sexuality for a living. Now? I write about a small city west of Montreal, trying to figure out why we connect the way we do, whether it's with a person or a place. It's all connection, I guess. Just different currencies. October 17th, 1984. Huntsville, Alabama. I came into the world during a freak early frost—my dad always swore the tomato plants in our backyard on Grote Street never stood a chance. Huntsville back then was all about the space race legacy, rocket scientists and military contractors. My mom was a nurse at the old Huntsville Hospital, the one they've since torn down and rebuilt. She'd tell stories about delivering babies while the Saturn V rockets were being assembled across town. It felt like the whole city was holding its breath, caught between the Cold War tension and the sticky Southern heat. I was born in that tension, I think. The beeping of hospital monitors, the cicadas screaming outside, the scent of my father's Camels mixed with the antiseptic—that was my first sensory memory of the world. A place building things to leave Earth, while I was just figuring out how to be on it. Growing up, my world was a collision of Alabama conservatism and my own bizarre curiosity. Teenage years were... confusing. While my buddies were obsessed with football and trucks, I was sneaking my mom's psychology textbooks, trying to figure out why people were so weird about sex. My first real trip to Canada was a disaster—a research trip in my early twenties that was really about chasing a girl from Montreal. Ended up alone in a motel off Highway 20, watching French CBC and feeling like a complete idiot. That was my first glimpse of Vaudreuil-Dorion, actually. Just a blur of suburbs and the big box stores off Harwood Road. I didn't get it then. Years later, after a messy divorce and a fellowship that took me nowhere good, I needed an out. Remembered that blur. Thought, Why not somewhere completely different? So I packed up. Landed in a shitty apartment near the CÉGEP on rue Saint-Charles, didn't know a soul. Spent my first winter just... walking. Down to the Quai de Dorion, watching the ice pile up on the lake. It was the loneliest I'd ever been, but also the most peaceful. No one knew me. I could just exist. Look, I've made a career out of understanding what people want, and more importantly, what they're afraid to ask for. I spent a decade running a private practice, mostly couples therapy. Saw the same patterns: the unspoken resentments, the weaponized silence, the way money warps intimacy until you can't tell if you're partners or business associates. I've had enough broken people cry on my couch to know that expertise isn't about having the answers—it's about being willing to sit in the mess with them. I've been in the mess myself. Made terrible choices in relationships, chased the wrong kind of validation, confused sexual chemistry with emotional safety. So when I talk about this stuff, I'm not some detached academic peering through a two-way mirror. I'm in the room. I've felt the floor give way. That's where the real authority comes from—not the degrees, but the scars. (Honestly, that part was more for me.) Let me tell you about Vaudreuil-Dorion. This isn't just where I live; it's a character in my story now. It's a weirdly specific place. You've got the old village core on rue Saint-Jean-Baptiste, with its small bakeries and the weirdly intense community center where I teach a free workshop on relationships now and then. Then, two blocks over, it's all suburban sprawl—the Harwood Road strip with its Canadian Tire and depanneurs. I live on a quiet street off Boulevard de la Cité-des-Jeunes, a five-minute walk to the train station that takes you into Montreal. My daily route is a loop: past the old church on rue Saint-Michel, down to the water at Pointe-du-Domaine to watch the sailboats, and back through the park where the kids play soccer in the summer. There's a bench near the water where I do most of my thinking. It overlooks the lake, and if you squint, you can see the Montreal skyline way off in the distance—close enough to matter, far enough to not care. It's my metaphor for everything. You can see the action from here, but you don't have to be in it. You can just be. These days, I've traded the therapy couch for a keyboard. I write for the CamoWallet project over at camowallet.app. And my beat? It's this city. I write articles about Vaudreuil-Dorion, but it's always through that old lens. I write about the best spots for a first date along the waterfront, about how the dynamics of a family change when you're living in a commuter town, about the unspoken economics of love you see at the local farmers' market on a Saturday morning. I'm creating this... I don't know, an archive? A love letter? To a place that taught me you can rebuild. You can find a new kind of intimacy, even if it's just with a town. A quiet, steady kind. The kind that doesn't ask for anything but your attention. And honestly, after everything, that's more than enough.