How I'm feeling today

My anxiety has been pretty bad lately. I always feel like I'm running out of time and that I have to do things straight away when I wake up. I had an hour lie-in today and woke up at 8 instead of 7, and was already having chest pains thinking about the time I had to get things done before I leave for work, even though I don't leave for work until 12. I have plenty of time and not a lot to do, but I still feel worried and upset, convinced that I have to do things straight away. 

Some of this is probably to do with the fact that my time here is coming to an end, and some is probably because I don't want to do what's on my to-do list. I have to tell a friend that I can't come to her leaving drinks. Part of the reason that I don't want to go is that I don't feel comfortable being around alcohol, and the other part is that the last time I saw them was a night that I thought I could give myself time off from my sobriety, and I ended up getting high. I'm very ashamed of this, and although I know this isn't important to other people, I still don't feel able to go. I've asked when she's working to see if we can meet another day, but she hasn't replied yet. 

I'm also worried about a present I have sent her. I don't know if she's going to receive it. I didn't understand how mailing things to her apartment works before I got it sent to her from the Etsy seller I chose. I'm worried that it's not going to get to her and that it'll be sat in the delivery locker without her being able to access it. This would make it a waste of money and a waste of the time and effort that the kind lady who I ordered it from put into trying to get it to her and making such a lovely product. It would have been helpful if she'd explained the process to me properly before I ordered it, but she would not have known that I wasn't sure if I'd be able to get the parcel to her. I am scared of contacting the lady who sent it because I don't want to find out if it has all been a waste of time and money. 

Looking at my blog this morning also made me a bit sad. No one reads my posts, and I am embarrassed to share them on Facebook because social media makes me uncomfortable and I don't want people to laugh at me. I don't have the skills or the confidence to take photos myself, so I can't post on Instagram because I use Pixabay photos, and so I paid for an ad campaign on X. I don't 100% know if it has worked, but it only cost me $8, so it doesn't matter if it doesn't work. At least I've made the effort. 

Now I've written my feelings down, I feel a little bit better, and hopefully people will read my post from yesterday. My anxiety comes and goes, and I don't know where this particularly bad patch came from or what set it off, but as long as I keep doing the things I absolutely have to, like taking care of myself and going to work, I will be okay until it eases up. These things just take time. 

xXx

Runaway

I want to run away today from a place that I'm not even in. 

In two months, I leave Brisbane for England and will get back to London on October 24th. I don't know where to go when I land; my dad doesn't want me to go to his house even though he has told my mum that I am okay to stay there, and I can't go to my mum's house because of her boyfriend. I have always made a point of not being in places where I'm not wanted; it's why I moved out of my mum's house at 18 in the first place, and I don't want to start doing it now. 

I hate being in places where people don't want me around. It's obvious when you are not wanted somewhere, and the awkwardness is stifling. When I was at uni, I moved in with a couple who immediately broke up. My other housemate was away, and I couldn't be in rooms with them because of how they acted around me; they had the secrets that permeated the rooms and made them sticky and uncomfortable. I vaguely remember asking what the problem was, but there was never an answer, and so I hid myself away like I'm doing right now. My aunty Jackie has a dog called Betty who sleeps in a crate. Jackie refers to Betty's crate as her safe space, and that's how I feel. I can shut out the world in here. Be alone. Read my books and watch my shows, and I don't have to worry about anyone not wanting me there. I have a right to be here. My four walls and my bed are my safe space, but I have to leave soon, and I won't have a safe space anymore. 

My friend has said I can stay at his Monday through Thursday when I get back to England, which is one of the kindest things anyone has ever done for me. He works away during the week and has a spare set of keys, so I'll be able to stay once I get back from Dublin and then again when I get back from Berlin. I have other friends I can stay with here and there to make up the days in between but the first night back is what's scaring me.

There's no question of me not going back. My flights are booked, and even if they weren't, I can't go to New Zealand unless I get my proof of residency from being at home first. From there, I have the money for my flight and my visa, thank-you tax rebate, and once it's approved and booked, I can go. New Zealand will be the first place I move to sober and the first place I move to where I'm not running away from the denial of my alcoholism. Each place I've moved feels like it has fulfilled a different purpose; New Zealand feels like the place for me to clear my head. To take time and space to let go of some of the last parts of my life in England and see how I feel about the future before I decide if it's time to set down roots and if it is, when, where and how. It's a completely different feeling to how I've felt about moving before, but I have an idea in my mind of what I want and what I need, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it pans out. I might want to run away from England even though I'm not there yet, but I'm not running away from myself anymore. 

I ended up asking my fairy Glenn mother for a favour, and hopefully I'll be able to stay with him the first night I'm in England. At the very least, there'll be somewhere for me to stay the first night I'm there where people want me around. 

Fingers crossed he says yes 

xXx

Fairwell to Fluoxetine

When I was a teenager, the medical field's understanding of mental health issues in young people was only just developing, to the point that it was burgeoning on non-existent. My parents and doctors tried, but the resources available to me were limited as I didn't fit into the categories that were usually set out for young people. The people I saw didn't really know how to help me, even though they really tried.

One of these good intentions was the idea that medication was the right choice for me from very early on. Lamotrigine saved my life, but it took a long time for doctors and psychiatrists to find the right medicine for my condition, and I was prescribed multiple different medications and dosages until I found the right one. One of the ones that they tried, the very first one they tried, was Fluoxetine. 

Commonly known as Prozac, Fluoxetine is an SSRI or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor that I was first prescribed when I was 15. Although I was prescribed multiple other medications throughout my diagnosis journey, I stayed pretty consistently on fluoxetine to the point that I didn't really know what it did anymore. A quick Google describes long-term SSRI use as anything over two years. I was taking fluoxetine for 18 years.

After a lengthy conversation with my doctor and a rather stupid incident whereby I cut my dosage by two-thirds overnight, it was decided that slowly reducing my dosage and eventually weaning myself off the drug was a good idea. I began lowering my dosage in September and eventually stopped taking them in February. 

It turns out, even after 18 years, fluoxetine was still doing its job by treating my anxiety. I was very young when I started to experience feelings of anxiety, too young to really know what anxiety was. After working this hard to wean myself off of them, I really don't want to start taking SSRIs again, and so now I'm having to find my own ways of managing my anxiety.

In the past, I would simply have used drugs or alcohol; nervousness was often one of the reasons that I drank. Now I'm getting sober, this method isn't an option, and so I'm having to find other ways of calming myself down. Pain helps, which is what has led to an increase in alternative methods of self-harming such as biting my arms, but that's not a healthy choice either. After all this time medicating with prescribed, legal and illegal drugs, I'm having to find healthy ways of making myself feel better, and it's proving to be a harder task than I thought it would be. 

So far, I've been working out what triggers my anxiety and what helps ease it. Being late, for instance, really upsets me, as does spending money. But listening to Agatha Christie books read by Hugh Fraser on Audible and watching Cleanwithbea, a lovely woman on YouTube who cleans people's houses for free, calms me down. I've still been getting quite upset, but I'm doing my best to remind myself that what I deem "bad" things aren't punishments, and that I don't need to hurt myself to feel better. 

But that's a conversation for another day

xXx

Sober stories, the first gig.

As of tomorrow, I will have been clean and sober from drugs and alcohol for 12 weeks. This is the longest I've gone without alcohol since University, and is coming pretty close to the longest I've been sober since I started drinking in the first place.

The alcohol free part hasn't been as difficult as I thought it would be. Not to say it's been easy by any means, but it hasn't been the hardest part. One of the things that has helped me stay sober is by telling people I'm sober. Not in an "I'm vegan" way, but just by saying that I don't drink if the subject comes up. By telling people that I'm sober when I've been in situations that involve alcohol, it's been easier to stick to soft drinks or alcohol-free beer. By not keeping it a secret, I don't have to worry about slipping because I'm trying to keep it a secret. 

Friday night, I went to my very first sober gig and saw Mojo Risin' - The Doors Experience at The Crowbar. The irony of the fact that it was a Doors tribute band was not lost on me. I was anxious about going because I didn't know if I'd be able to stay away from alcohol when I was in a situation where I'd normally have a drink. I can stay away from pubs, but seeing live music is something I really enjoy, and I don't want to give that up. I knew I'd enjoy myself, but I was scared that I'd be too tempted and try to rationalize why one shot of whisky or a pint of beer would be okay. Worrying that I wouldn't have a good time without alcohol didn't factor in as much as I thought it would. 

Staying sober that night was hard, but I managed it. Turns out Heaps Normal make a decent alcohol-free lager, and I chewed so much gum to keep my mouth busy that I woke up feeling like I'd spent the night gurning my tits off on speed. I'm not usually a huge fan of being around drunk people, and the people standing behind me were high, which drunk me would have seen as a segway into getting high myself, but it didn't bother me as much as I thought it would. I enjoyed myself and, more importantly, I was proud of myself. 

J

Brisbane updates

At the beginning of the year, I decided that I didn't want to move around as much in 2026 because of how much I travelled in 2025. Obviously, this didn't quite go to plan, and in March, I moved to the third city I've lived in in 3 months and headed to Brisbane. This was partly due to an amazing Pulp gig I went to and partly because Cairns kind of sucked. 

When you live in a city filled with backpackers, it can be difficult to find work. After applying for over a hundred positions I was only successful at one position that I absolutely hated due to my being terrible with numbers. Cities where international travellers can extend their visa through working in hospitality are difficult to find work in because employers know that they can treat them like trash and they won't leave. They're there not just because they need the money, but because without the work they have to leave Australia. Work aside I found it difficult to settle in Cairns and, as Brisbane is the largest city in Queensland, it made sense to hop on a plane and head over. 

Brisbane has been good for me, but I'm still struggling. I'm using this move to get sober and I thought that finally quitting drugs and alcohol would mean that I would finally feel in control. Finally feel at peace. This hasn't been the case and I'm feeling worse than ever. I feel so ugly that I want to hurt myself every time I look in the mirror and spent a morning not too long ago smacking myself around the head and biting my arms because I felt so hideous. I was telling myself over and over that I'm so ugly I should be dead and, no matter how many days of sobriety I have under my belt, this feeling isn't going away. 

I have nobody to talk to here either. My friendships from back home are disintegrating and I'm realising more and more that it's not just people I date that I let treat me badly but a lot of people in general. People say things that are spiteful and vicious and mean and I just sit and take it because I'm so afraid of being alone or rejected. Even though these people say things that they know will hurt me I sit and take it. Because if I stand up to them and they decide they don't want to be my friend anymore I will be alone. 

I'm also exhausted. I'm working two jobs to get by and I still can't work my sums out. I feel stupid and useless and pathetic and alone and although I'm trying to make sure my job isn't my entire personality I still find myself stressing about how many hours of work I am getting. I can't talk to people about my job though because they mock it, say I'm going to quit or tell me it's toxic. People are so hell bent on telling me my life is bad and I have no idea why. 

Not drinking is actually proving to be easier than I thought. It's still hard and the temptation is still there but the longer I go the more I want to continue. I went out for drinks when my friend left work the other day and I only drank alcohol free beer, which is disgusting by the way, and I made it through my birthday and April 20th completely sober. Tomorrow I'll have been sober an entire month which is probably the longest I've been without a drink since before I moved to Toronto. It's nice to not feel hungover, to know what I've said or done and to not be afraid to re-read the conversations I've had the night before when I wake up but I still feel the same. I'm still broke. I'm still out of control and I still want to hurt myself. 

I also don't remember the last time I craved cocaine this much. 

Brisbane is lovely though and I've been doing lots of fun things that I haven't been able to do in other cities. I went to see a screening of Toy Story played by a live orchestra, I have tickets to reading of the sequel to a book that I really love in June and next week I went to see Jeff Goldblum's jazz band.

I'm just working hard on focusing on my sobriety, being more present and not making my job my entire personality. I think those are good goals to have. 

Jess

Side by Side, Jordan Clayden-Lewis

 

They say to never judge a book by its cover, but it is also important to never judge a book by its title. Unfortunately for Side by Side by Jordan Clayden-Lewis, I was able to immediately work out the plot by doing both of these things. 

Side by Side is a MM romance about a man that moves to Brisbane for a job at a marketing company. I have to say he was a pretty relatable character. LGBTQ millennial, moving to Brisbane after travelling round Europe, he ticked a lot of boxes in terms of relatability. However it was these characteristics that made it seem that Clayden-Lewis was either a) determined to tell the reader that he's a millennial gay man or b) someone who had never met a gay man in his life and was running exclusively on cliches. 

This is not a comment on authors shoving LGBTQ agendas down reader's throats, but more a criticism on how one dimensional the characters seemed. He made each character's gender/sexuality their entire personality, and made little to no attempt to flesh them out into believable characters. There was one character involved in a weakly written  B-plot who sold a bookcase to one of the main characters, but it had zero influence on the actual plot. She asked him to writer her memoirs for absolutely no reason and it inexplicably involved the Vietnam War.

Don't get me wrong, Why are we in Vietnam by Norman Mailer is one of my favourite texts and I'd highly recommend it, but the conflict had nothing to do with the love lives of a twenty something gay man and a widow in her 70s.

It's clear that the author was trying to write a beach read that appealed LGBTQ readers but the cliched language choices and obvious plot lines fell short. If you want to read something that requires less energy than reading a grocery list I'd recommend it, but if not I wouldn't waste your time. 

The Other Side of Together, by Emily Cox and Nicole Allen.

It's been a long time since I read an entire book in one sitting, it's been a long time since I posted a book review, and it's been a long time since I sat in bed sobbing over words on a page. This one hit the trifecta; it broke me, and so I'm sitting in a communal kitchen at 11:30 at night with my fingers flying over the keys. 

The Other Side of Together by Emily Cox and Nicole Allen is about many kinds of love. Love for the family that's related to you, love for the family that chooses you and love for the people you choose to love, even if you're not supposed to. Meili and Marcus live in San Francisco. She's the daughter of Taiwanese immigrant restaurant owners and dreams of being a chef. Marcus is the star of the soccer team on his way to an Ivy League Universit,y and the son of local detective, Ray.

Meili and her family are undocumented immigrants living in America, and she is involved with an older man named Nick, whose father helped her family enter the country illegally and set up their restaurant. At first, Nick appears to be helping her with her dreams of being a chef, promising her cooking lessons, internships, exposure and the opportunity to move to Los Angeles. It soon becomes apparent that Nick wants more from their relationship, and he becomes aggressive and violent in his pursuit of Meili. 

It's on the way home from one of these meetings that we are introduced to Marcus. Gorgeous and popular, Marcus is on his way to an Ivy League school with a full scholarship. He's the sports star every YA novel needs, and his introduction made me think that the novel was going to circle around the cliched trope of the high school heart-throb falling in love with the shy nerd.  I was put off at first because it seemed like a story that had been told over and over again. 

After a brief introduction, Marcus and Meili begin communicating via secret love notes passed between neighbour Guo Mama, and they form an immediate connection. But there's a catch. Not only can Meili not fall for Marcus because of her family's immigration status, but Marcus can't fall for Meili either. Marcus's heart and body must remain his own until he graduates. His father got his girlfriend pregnant at 18, only for her to disappear. This left him with a young son and a hatred of the fairer sex stronger than that of the most aggressively homosexual male. Ray expects his son to swear off women the same way he has, and  has promised him a motorbike if he stays away from the temptresses that walk his halls until after he graduates. Girls, dating and relationships are off limits if he wants to ride off into the sunset on a shiny set of wheels. Marcus's member has to remain permanently concealed. 

This resolve begins to falter once he starts spending time with Meili, but he is remarkably self-controlled for a teenage boy for a good half of the novel. They go on dates, they hold hands, but their lips remain sealed. Not only because he doesn't want to miss out on his free motorbike, but also because Meili refuses to tell him about her family's status and relationship with Nick. Even when he catches him aggressively attempting to kiss her, earning him the title of Face Eater, she doesn't tell him what's going on.

Alongside the Meili/ Marcus/ motorbike/ immigration drama, there's also a B-plot that could have done with fleshing out. We are told that 14 women have gone missing from the town. This isn't really mentioned again until the end of the novel. 

As the novel progresses, the serious nature of what Meili is concealing becomes more apparent. Nick returns and assaults her in his apartment, and his henchman attacks Marcus on his way home. Despite these physical altercations, it's not until his grandma catches him completely ignoring his father's wishes and finally making it to second base that Meili finally flees. He thinks it's because his grandmother caught him in a jam; she knows that Marcus is likely to be attacked again and that she and her family are also in danger. Leaving his apartment, she promptly ghosts him in an attempt to keep the two of them, and her entire family, safe and refuses to reveal her secrets. 

As Marcus desperately tries to reach out, Meili continues to isolate herself. Ignoring his phone calls, video chat attempts and messages despite his persistence. These attempts fall on heartbroken ears as Nick returns to San Francisco to collect his "prize". Meili flies to Los Angeles to play the role of his fiancée. 

He dresses her, buys her jewels and makes it abundantly clear that her family will suffer if she refuses to play the role of his doting future wife. He owns her; she was promised to him, and it's not only until the reappearance of the missing character from the very beginning of the novel that there's any whisper of his plans unravelling. 

I told you the B-plot needed fleshing out. 

Su Ling returns as a waitress at the gala Nick uses to debut his future bride and tells Meili that she was trafficked and taken away from her children. As he attempts to rape Meili, Su Ling assaults him and helps her escape from LA, throwing her into a taxi that drives her from LA to San Francisco and she lands at Guo Mama's front door.

In attempts to rid himself from his heart-break, Marcus attends his senior prom with a girl called Taveh who's apparently been in love with him since the 6th grade. She plays a very small part in the novel, but is a fun tertiary character and provides light relief from the seriousness of the plot. She's cute, she dances, and she's under no illusion that Marcus has any interest in her and listens to him talk about Meili. She leaves triumphantly, pleased with herself for finally telling him how she feels, and goes off to Berkeley University without being mentioned again. 

Seriously, the number of students who end up going to Ivy League schools is nothing short of a miracle. 

Returning home, Marcus overhears Ray on the phone and learns that he has been lying to him. He doesn't believe all women are the devil after all and is dating a woman called Kenna, who's brief introduction causes Marcus to throw some serious shade at Ray for lying and runs to find Meili. It's really convenient how he doesn't know she ever left and yet he miraculously finds her at Guo Mama's house immediately after she returns, but this is a YA text after all. 

Ignoring Guo Mama's insistence that they can't be together, he finds Meili on the floor of the shower, covered in the evidence of Nick's assault. He diverts his gaze, covers her in a robe and carries her to bed, where she finally tells him what she has been hiding for so long and falls asleep in his arms. If it weren't a story peppered with human trafficking, assault and the threat of deportation, it would be the moment that every woman has ever dreamed of. 

Guo Mama explains to Marcus that it is not safe for Meili to remain in San Francisco but that she has a cousin in Seattle with a cottage, conveniently big enough for two, and that he could go with her. He runs home to collect his things and is immediately cornered by his father in full-on police mode, who threatens to arrest him, pumps him full of questions about Meili and reveals that he has been involved in a 4 year investigation about Nick. Thanks to Meili's anonymous tip, he has now been arrested for sex trafficking. He takes Marcus home, making him promise not to leave the house and returns to the station, rapping up the story line with far less information than was needed. 

Given that this is a YA novel and there is nothing stronger than a teenage romance, Marcus ignores his father's wishes and rides his motorbike over to Meili, riding off into the sunset in a way that can only exist in the romantic fiction. The story ends, Meili escapes, and I didn't get the epilogue I so desperately craved.

Seriously, the temptation to write my own fanfic for this one is strong. 

As I said, this novel broke me. As much of a crier as I am, I rarely cry over books, preferring to save my tears for my own pity parties. I fully expected this text to be the stereotypical sports superstar meets shy nerd romance, with only a small altercation around 75% of the way through, threatening to keep them apart, but I was wrong. This novel was brutal, beautiful, and although I would have preferred to learn more about Meili's family and their immigration to America, the main plot was thoroughly fleshed out. It's a short text, less than 300 pages and, I can understand why the authors chose not to add more to these secondary and tertiary plot lines. Would I recommend it? Yes. Would I recommend reading it when you're in a good mood? Yes. But would I recommend reading it without a box of tissues to hand?

Hell fucking no. 

xXx

Find The Other Side of Together and it's sequel The Other Side of Apart here: 

www.emilycoxnicoleallen.com

https://a.co/d/0cbcIn68