I May Have Thoughts

See what I did there, since I've only been posting once a month of late

Hello, everyone! And by everyone I mean the now over 100 subscribers I was recently informed by Substack that I have! So that’s exciting. Welcome, new folks! Also now I feel like I really need to write something!

This isn’t my usual style, but I think I’ll start back up with something short and (relatively) lightweight.

I was just in France

So I took a long trip to Europe with my sweetheart, and we spent the lion’s share of it in Lyon, a city nobody talks about for some reason. There seems to be a bit of a running joke there, about how they used to be the capital, but aren’t anymore. Of course they mean that Lughdunum was the Roman capital of the region, the capital of the Gauls. But there’s something to the way they say that. There’s a pride, and a humility, balanced. There’s a sense of the city’s, not greatness exactly, but goodness. A deep, spiritual core.

Lyon is very, very old.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I want to talk about a very specific French cultural thing that I miss, now I’ve been back in Halifax for all of a week.

Shoutout to my noise-sensitive peeps

Who else around here can’t stand loud noises, and indeed gets deeply upset by people, machines, and the world in general being unnecessarily loud? I just looked at my own archives, and I don’t seem to have talked about it here, at least not as an explicit post topic. But from the time I was very young, I have had A Problem with noises. Vacuum cleaner, thunderstorm, hand dryer, whatever — when I was very little, I would have absolute screaming meltdowns over them.

I remember a feeling of terror, but also a feeling of shame, because my screaming meltdowns weren’t received especially well. One of my earliest EMDR sessions with my therapist was around an incident at a beach club when I was probably 3 or 4, and my cousin decided it would be very funny to put his toy boat, with its loud electric propeller, under the door of the cabana bathroom where my mother was already struggling to give me a shower, which was itself loud and scary enough to upset me.

(I’ll probably write more about this, and my likely neurodivergence, another time when I’m not trying to be short and relatively lightweight, two things that have never come particularly easily to me as a six-foot, 200 pound woman, but whatever.)

So Lyon is a city, a sizeable one, though much, much more manageable than Paris. Of course there is noise: toxic idiots run their loud cars and motorcycles, blast trap music from their cars, and yell in the streets when drunk. Buses use air brakes, emergency vehicles have sirens (though their sound is much more charming), and kids scream their fool heads off on playgrounds and school fields. It’s all just as overwhelming and noise-pollute-y as any city its size.

The difference is when you go inside.

French people aren’t loud indoors.

I had heard about this, but had trouble believing it was true, even though I observed it in Quebec, too. French people think you shouldn’t talk loudly indoors. They also think that if a child is with them in a space that is primarily for adults, that the child needs to match the mood. If a kid can’t manage it, the adults tend to remove their kids from the space. Not because the kid is wrong or bad, but because the kid needs to be someplace they can be a kid right now, and the adults who didn’t ask to be around kids being kids are trying to have their own experience.

I can barely express the way this affected me, but I’ll try.

1. I felt so much more relaxed when in a cafe, or bar, or restaurant, or supermarket, even a train car — really anywhere (that wasn’t full of tourists). People tended to go about their business, have conversations with each other that added up to a murmur, and avoided being overly boisterous. It’s not like French people aren’t full of joie de vivre, or like all public indoor spaces are like libraries. But there’s just this consideration of other people that’s built in to the culture, like, it’s rude to take up so much space, other people have to have space, too. This habit quiets my nervous system enormously.

2. I spent a Friday evening in a bar filled with young people, and I never had to raise my voice to converse with my friends. It was wild. Possibly because of the tendency to speak in indoor voices, places also don’t seem driven to play their music super-loud.

3. That feeling of dread I get when I see a small child somewhere that I’m going to eat or spend some time, just waiting for when their cope runs out and they start screaming, or even just talking really loudly and ceaselessly because they’re a kid and haven’t learned to modulate their voice yet? Massively reduced. In my experience, either the kid is chill (because they feel safe? Modeling from the parents? I have no idea how this works), or when they lose it, the parent removes them from the scene. There’s a whole lot of ink spilled about French parenting, and I don’t want to get into those weeds, but I definitely felt a difference.

4. Also, kids in general seemed cuter to me. Part of this is my weakness for little kids speaking a foreign language. But part of it is, for example, the family that was on our train from Lyon to Paris. The older girl, maybe seven, had a keen, thoughtful look, but started to look troubled at a certain point and then suddenly vomited. The family’s, and the train staff’s, response to this was so calm and kind and unfussy that it explained to me how the kid seemed herself so unruffled, if temporarily grossed out by her own soiled hands, which she held in the air like floppy birds until she was able to go wash them. Meanwhile, the younger child, probably 3 or so, didn’t make a peep the entire trip.

I recognize that a lot of these points are about kids, and the whole indoor-quiet thing is about the adults just as much, if not more. But I can’t help but feel as though this approach — essentially letting kids hang out with adults if they’re able to act like adults, but having them go off to their own activities if they need to go be kids — is something that creates the kind of adults who try not to take up all of the sonic space in a room when other people are around. Just for my own sanity, I appreciate this greatly. And it upsets me anew to be in public spaces, on this side of the pond, where neither children nor adults seem to have any sense of how goddamn loud they are, constantly.

I feel seen.

Better hold it here for now

I just got into three additional paragraphs about my childhood, about parenting I’ve observed among my peers, and other stuff that threatens to get very not-short and very not-lightweight indeed, and so I’ve copied those into another draft (I only have 21 drafts, what?), and now I have something to return to on another day, when I really feel like pissing off the American parenting-industrial complex.

For now, though, I just want to breathe one more sigh of appreciation and longing for France, and ask once more plaintively the question I’ve had my entire life: why can’t people shut up?

More seriously: it’s sobering, in a way, to go someplace different for a while and to see that while sure, people are mostly people wherever you go, there are ways that they are different. And sometimes those differences show that something else is possible, that a different way of living with one another is possible. And while that gives me hope, it also makes me sad. Because while Halifax is a good deal quieter than Boston…it’s still friggin loud.