William_Lewis

tags as instructed, and use for each paragraph, ensuring no extra technical notes or word counts are included. The title should be engaging and reflect his expertise and location. I’m William Lewis. And yeah, I’m from Baie-Comeau. I’m William. Born here, live here, work here. Baie-Comeau isn’t just a dot on the map for me. I write about relationships, money, and the weird intersection of the two. Spent decades studying sexology, human behavior, the whole messy emotional package. Now I write for the CamoWallet project on their website, camowallet.app. Trying to make sense of how we connect—and how we pay for it, literally and metaphorically. I don’t just talk about this stuff. I’ve lived it. Maybe too much. But that’s another story. Let’s start at the beginning. Or somewhere close to it. Growing up here? It’s a trip. The town's small, but the experiences... they can be huge. I remember hanging out near the paper mill, the smell of pulp in the air—that weird sweet-sour smell you never forget. My friends and I, we’d dare each other to walk the train tracks that run along the river. The Manicouagan. It’s this monstrous, beautiful river. We thought we were tough. We were just kids from the North Shore, trying to figure out what the world looked like beyond the 138 highway. First crush? A girl named Marie-Ève. We kissed behind the arena on Place La Salle. I was thirteen. Felt like the whole universe shifted. Then her dad found out, and suddenly I was just the kid with the weird questions. I guess I’ve always had them. Baie-Comeau is in my blood. You can't grow up here and not be shaped by it. The river, the woods, the sheer... scale of the sky. It’s isolating, but that isolation forces you inward. You either get restless, or you get reflective. I got both. I know every pothole on Rue Bossé. I've eaten a hundred steaks at the restaurant Le Rochefort, sat in the same booth, watching the snow pile up outside. The Cégep de Baie-Comeau—that’s where I first started formally studying psychology, before I went all-in on sexology. It felt small at the time, but it was my launchpad. I worked for a while at the CRSSS de la Côte-Nord, the health and social services centre. Saw a lot there. People in crisis, people in love, people just... trying. It grounds you. Makes you realize that desire isn't this abstract, glamorous thing. It's messy. It's real. It's as real as the cold wind coming off the St. Lawrence. I was born on February 8th, 1980. At the hospital on Boulevard La Salle. The snow that winter—I’m told—was brutal. Drifted higher than the cars. My dad, he worked at the aluminum plant, the one that’s still there, looming over the town. He drove my mom to the hospital in an old pickup, probably cursing the weather the whole way. They were kids themselves, really. Nineteen and twenty-one. Baie-Comeau back then was a company town. It still is, in a way. The whole rhythm of life here, it’s tied to the mills, the plants, the paper. You grow up with the sound of the trains, the foghorns on the river. My first home was a small duplex on Rue de Puyjalon, just a few blocks from the water. I don’t remember it, but I’ve walked past it a thousand times. It’s strange to think of that William, the one who didn't know anything about heartbreak or money or the strange dance people do to get close to each other. He was just a tiny thing, wrapped in blankets, in a town buried in snow. Here’s the thing people don’t get about studying sex and relationships. It’s not about technique. It’s about honesty. And being honest is terrifying. I’ve had my heart stomped on. More than once. I’ve been the one doing the stomping, too. Not proud of it. But it taught me that the stuff I was reading in textbooks—the attachment theories, the economic models of dating—it was all real. It plays out in bedrooms, in bank accounts, in the way you fight about money on a Tuesday night. I’ve sat across from couples in my office—I used to have a small practice here on Rue Cartier—and watched them tear each other apart over a credit card bill, when the real issue was a total lack of trust. Or intimacy. Or both. It’s all tangled up. Money is just the thing we fight with. Sex is just the thing we use to pretend we’re close. The real work is underneath. I’m not perfect at it. God, no. But after forty-something years, after the research, the mess, the relationships that worked and the ones that were spectacular failures, I think I’ve earned the right to have an opinion. Maybe even to help someone else untangle their own knot.