Suffocating Small-Town Life

Martinique is getting ready for Christmas
 by rolling out to the mall - including myself
and apparently many of my students

Today I had to rush from work to the  little grocery store in the shopping center to get my sick flatmate groceries and saw one of my students walking with her dad. She happened to not see me, unlike the speckling of kids that called out to me out of their housing project windows as I walked home. Or the student who came to wait by me for the bus last night. Or the two students who stared at me in the mall as if they thought I never left the school. Or the student I saw on the boardwalk on Friday. Or the only student who's heard me speak French, only because I was afraid his tiny little seven-year-old self was riding the bus alone (his teenage brother was a couple of seats over).
Don't get me wrong, all of these encounters are adorable. But they are telling symptoms of one of the conditions I most detest here: the small-town life.
Speaking to a couple of teachers who took my (then well) flatmate and I out on a beach trip some weeks ago, I learned that both of them had briefly lived in the mainland for a while. Why only briefly? To roughly translate, they were all on their own out there. Here in Martinique they are surrounded by family and life-long friends. If ever they need help, someone is there. Everyone knows everybody, so they feel surrounded by friends, not strangers, which is hardly the case in the mainland. The main reason they gave for returning almost immediately was because they missed that sense of intimate community.
I've heard similar comments second-hand from my friends' parents back in Alabama, from adults who can't imagine being so far from their parents, their cousins, from everyone they've known their whole life like I am. For them, too, proximity to people they know well is a comfort they can hardly imagine being without.
I, on the other hand, can barely imagine that I have to live with it until May.
The former president of my high school, chiding me for wanting to go to Columbia, identified the feeling I'd always felt but never articulated as "the desire to be anonymous in a crowd, for no one to know or care who your mother or your father is". To me, that is always the best part of moving - no one knows who I am or who my family is or my life story. Moving away from people I actually love is hard, but leaving behind the world where everyone knows what I'm up to, even if I don't, is a great relief. What I dread perhaps most of all about visiting my parents is being caught in public by people I sorta know, who feel entitled to know all sorts of details about my life and express their surprise and judgement about it - that I'm living so far, or in Europe, or that I'm still single, or that I'm not "home taking care of [my] parents" (who are only 47 and 46, by the way).
Here, every public outing is a risk to see someone you know. Every professional encounter includes a segment where Martinicans try to figure out who they know in common or, if they already know each other, catch up on all their family news. Everybody knows somebody living in my neighborhood and seems inexplicably reassured by this fact, as if it tells them something about me.
Fin, bref, living in Martinique, even in the capital, is just like being at home, in more bad ways than one. I, however perversely, simply want for no one to care who I am or what I'm up to and to keep their opinions about my life to themselves.
Is that a weird thing to ask?