Shi:
Alright, starting off the Kay & Shi Show here in this installment with things we don’t do and this one is drinking booze.
Kay:
Now we quit drinking in 2019 so it has now been almost three years.
Shi:
Three and a half years.
Kay:
Three and a half years of sobriety from alcohol for Shila and I, and man, what a clear three years this has been.
Shi:
A clear three and a half years indeed and the time leading up to that felt the opposite of clear. It felt murky. It felt muddy. It felt like there were tethers on our potential and on our characters and we didn’t realize how much tethering there was until we did this. So, in 2018, we have a few experiences with alcohol that really start to make us question our relationship with alcohol. Now, Shila here speaking, being seven years older, have had a lot longer of a relationship with alcohol than Kay, you have, and particularly Chad and I. It was like a cornerstone of our relationship, but going out to a bar, using it for celebration, using it for consoling, using it for its Tuesday afternoon and you want to cut loose and have fun. It really was one of those things that were really present in our lives and our identities way more than we realized. So, Chad and I had a tradition to take one month off a year just to kind of keep our drinking in check and give our bodies that reset. But at 2018, by the end of it–Kay included–we were all feeling just kind of gross, knew we were definitely doing the one month off but wasn’t sure if we might go a little bit longer than that.
Kay:
So, in 2019 we took off January from drinking, and by the end of January, Shila and I kind of looked at each other and we were like, “Okay, let’s just try another month. Let’s just go into February,” and then by halfway through February, I told Shila, “I’m going first quarter. Let’s make this happen. First quarter,” and she’s like, “I don’t know. I don’t know if I can do it.”
Shi:
A big trip next month.
Kay:
We got a lot of things going on. By the end of February. Shila was on from the first quarter too and by the end of Q1 of 2019, I know I was definitely starting to sing the song of “I’m not sure if I’m ever picking that bottle up again.”
Shi:
Yeah, well, you definitely knew we wanted to, “Let’s go for the whole year.” We can do it for a year and by August of that month, we’d both lost dozens of pounds. We had so much more clarity. We’d saved a bunch of money. We had still created memories that we remembered and that nothing was embarrassing or brown or fuzzy or any of those moments where you have to question. All of that had been removed. So, we had all these amazing, amazing benefits and it was from a single elimination, not a category of eliminations, not daily choices you have to make. Just one thing, turn the switch off, not drinking alcohol and we saw this insane stacking of benefits and we really started to question the prevalence of alcohol in our lives, in our identities, and in our society at large.
Kay:
Well, one of the things that we were nervous about was that eliminating alcohol was going to eliminate the giggles, eliminate the fun, eliminate the silliness, eliminate the let loose. But it turns out that was us and not the alcohol and there was all of that still present in us without necessarily needing that out of ingredient of alcohol.
Shi:
It also eliminated things that we didn’t realize were happening all the time like negotiations, about who would drive on a certain night or negotiations about, “Oh, I don’t want to sign up for that early thing, because that’s a Saturday morning and Friday night means having some drinks” or trying to find that those designated drivers or worrying if you slurred in front of your kids in getting through the bedtime story, because–oops–you just had two champagnes, but you hadn’t had any food. There was all of this mental chatter that went away when we eliminated alcohol and then we realized how much social chatter there is around alcohol. I think our disgust with it really was summed up when we saw a sweatshirt in a shop that said, “I’m not slurring, I’m speaking in cursive.” We just saw that and both of us looked at each other like this is what we’re celebrating. This is something to be celebrated and realized how prevalent it is and how dangerous it can be.
Kay:
Well, it’s crazy how it gets promoted and accepted in such a way that makes people, I think, not realize the harm that it might be doing to their lives. In our family, there is a heavy history of deep alcoholism. We’ve literally watched it destroy people that we love time and time again. So, seeing on the shirt and on the dinner towel and on the “This isn’t wine in here, it’s just coffee,” on a mug and it being this ha-ha kind of funny thing or watching shows that have people that are literally drinking at all hours of the day and they seem just fine in the show, but we know that that is not how that would go down if someone were to be drinking at that level. So, it got almost creepy.
Shi:
It did and look, we’re not condemning alcohol. It has been a fixture of the human race for all of recorded history and in times of revelry or reverence or a celebration, it very well may be the appropriate thing. But if your family is like our family and has a history of alcoholism or if anything that we shared with you sounds a little close to what your experience with your relationship with alcohol is, we would definitely encourage you and invite you to join us and just trying out not drinking for an extended period of time and give your body and your mind that chance to recover.
Coming up next. We’re going to talk about another thing that we don’t do anymore and this one I’m excited to talk about in particular because it’s inspired by one of my favorite characters, Miss Lisa Simpson.
Kay:
That thing is eating meat and you’ll hear about that more tomorrow.
