Dear Esteemed Readers,
Back in December of 2024, I received an important gift.
I was writing with my headphones on when it was delivered, so I didn’t get to interact with the giver. Instead—once the holiday-cheer spreader had left—Alicia brought the present into my office and set it down on my writing desk.
It was a small plate of cookies and brownies—only the cookies had been soaked in bourbon.
“They said the bourbon’s been cooked off,” my also sober wife offered. “But maybe we should throw the cookies away. Just to be safe. They smell kind of strong.”
“Well,” some terrible part of me said, “if the alcohol really was cooked off, what’s the harm in just tasting them?”
Then I popped one in my mouth.
The bourbon-soaked cookie was moist and mind-blowingly delicious. But it also tasted like bourbon. A lot like bourbon. And I began to feel the old familiar burn of alcohol lighting up my tongue.
Then all hell broke out in my psyche; suddenly, every cell in my body was at war.
Team sobriety was screaming, “SPIT THAT COOKIE OUT RIGHT NOW! THIS IS AN EMERGENCY! DANGER! SPIT THAT COOKIE OUT! SPIT IT OUT! SPIT! IT! OUT!”
Simultaneously—and like a genie released from a bottle—team drunken bliss floated up from the depths of my unconscious. Then it began using the sexy, raspy voice that Scarlett Johansson deploys while playing an artificial intelligence program throughout the 2013 Spike Jonze movie Her. This is the type of Lauren-Bacall-femme-fatale voice that even notorious tough guy Humphrey Bogart couldn’t resist. It melts me like butter over an open flame.
Scarlett Johansson whispered, ”Swallow, Matthew. Just swallow. Be a good boy. Do it for me. Slide on back into alcohol. Don’t you want to feel warm again? Don’t you want to float? Return to the restful amniotic fluid of your mother’s womb? Let me take care of you. Let me love you. Let me wipe your mind clean of everything that is unpleasant. Let me take you all the way back to the beginning. Back to when nothing was your fault and you had no sin and all you knew was swaddling and the feeding nipple and round-the-clock care. I want to do all this for you. I want to do everything for you. I want you to be my drunk little baby.”
For a horrible moment, I was frozen.
My tongue was electrified with desire.
I hadn’t tasted alcohol in six and a half years. But I still knew the magical burn better than I know my childhood home. Swallowing would produce a psychological orgasm that I would not be able to resist replicating over and over and over.
“Come back to me, baby,” Scarlett Johansson whispered in my mind. “Just do one tiny little swallow for me.”
Finally, team sobriety screamed, “DO YOU REALLY HATE YOURSELF THIS MUCH?”
Then it flashed the below image in my mind:
That’s me at the height of my alcoholism, about a decade ago. Alicia took the pic in Scotland. There are several aspects to note.
In the photo, I weigh at least sixty more pounds than I currently do. My nose is red from drinking an excess of whisky and beer the night before. My face is sweaty from light walking up mild inclines. My head looks like it is in the process of exploding. I’m making a goofy expression to distract future viewers from what a physical, emotional, and psychological mess I was at the time. Even just looking at the photo now produces the boa-constrictor-coiled-around-my-chest feeling of daily high blood pressure, which I haven’t had since I quit drinking, started exercising more, and lost a significant amount of weight. The pic makes me once again feel the joints of my toes and ankles aflame with gout, which also disappeared, when I stopped drinking and lost weight.
But the thing I find most telling is the slogan on my shirt: ‘Defend Beer.’ I bought that t-shirt in New York City. On a brewery tour. It was my favorite piece of clothing. I wore it proudly. Back then I would have joined the bloodiest of crusades, happily risked my life, done pretty much anything to defend alcohol. It was the most important thing in my world and I proudly—and perhaps masochistically—wanted everyone to know it. Or was my wearing that t-shirt a cry for help that no one answered? Regardless, I didn't go anywhere or do anything without booze. It was my god. I would have died for it. I was dying for it. Just look at the photo of me above. That is not a man living, that is a man committing slow suicide.
When I was at the height of my alcoholism, a friend’s wife gave us a collection of photos she had taken during a trip we all went on together, consuming much alcohol along the way. While my friend’s wife was presenting the pictures to the group, I remember pointing to a person in one of the shots and saying, “Who is this guy?” which made everyone laugh. It took me a second to figure out why they were amused. Then it hit me. The man in the photo was me. Only I looked so bloated and awful, I literally did not recognize myself. This is when I realized my cognitive dissonance was producing something that bordered on psychosis. To bolster my rickety self-esteem and keep me drinking, alcohol was subbing in palatable fantasies for distasteful but real sensory experiences. I had stopped really looking in mirrors long ago. I hated having my picture taken. With alcohol flowing through my veins, I felt beautiful, light, worry-free, and even healthy. And anyone who, or anything that dared to challenge the above narrative was promptly excommunicated from the life of Matthew Quick. Alcohol was my only arbiter of truth. And it never failed to say—in a wonderfully seductive Scarlett-Johansson voice—that I was living my best life.
But back in my office last December, the horrific mental image of the formerly bloated and sick alcoholic me in Scotland finally got present sober me to spit out the bourbon cookie. Then I said to my wife, “We need to throw these out right now.”
We stuffed the bourbon cookies down the garbage disposal and promptly ground them up, because the alcoholic in me would have had no problem sneaking back into the kitchen to eat the bourbon cookies directly out of a trashcan.
Sometimes to this very day, the Scarlett Johansson voice tries to convince me that my fear of alcohol is just a silly game I’m playing with myself and others.
She says, “This is all just a cry for attention. You were never really an alcoholic. After all, you never hit a classic rock bottom, did you? You never crashed your car while drunk. You never woke up in a gutter after a night of binge drinking. You never were financially reckless. You never went to rehab. You haven’t even attended a single AA meeting. You never missed a day of work because of drinking. No one ever called you an alcoholic. Your mother might have once or twice said you looked ‘puffy,’ but ‘puffy’ is a far cry from being called a drunk. You used to do just fine in TV and radio interviews when you were drinking heavily. Your career was in full bloom—in much better shape than it is now that you are sober. You made so much more money when you got drunk nightly. People liked you better when you were drinking. You were such a gregarious drunk. Your heaviest drinking years overlapped with the height of your Hollywood success. And I find big men so incredibly sexy. The culture has brainwashed you. You only think you look and feel better now. But remember how much fun we had together? How I was always there for you every single night, no matter what? How you and I would get going once your wife went to sleep? When you’d pour yourself that last nightcap—after the six or seven drinks you’d already had—I’d always put the full weight of my hand on yours, just so you’d give yourself that end-of-the-day big-boy pour you deserved. And then you and I would drift off into ecstasy. Remember how beautiful that was? Well, I’m still here, baby. Your tolerance has got to be so low by now. All you’d have to do is sip the tiniest amount of alcohol. You can still disappear into me. Imagine if you’d swallowed that one little bourbon cookie just to get things nice and lubed. You could have so easily slid back down into bliss. What good times we’d already be having.”
This inner siren eternally sings me toward a big scotch on the rocks.
Sirens are of the gods.
My analyst says I need a god to beat a god.
He and I have talked a lot about Dionysus—the god of wine-making, ritual madness, and religious ecstasy, among other things. My analyst has often said Dionysus does not care what happens to the men and women who worship him. He uses alcohol to possess us. But he is an ancient god who only sees humans as logs for his mad drunken fire. And that is why so many Dionysian devotees tragically meet premature ends.
The Dionysian caution tale my analyst used early in my analysis was Jim Morrison of The Doors, who embodied Dionysus early in life, quickly rose to great heights, and then tragically died at twenty-seven years of age. There are many other famous modern Dionysus devotees we could all easily name. They made divine madness through substance abuse their god and sacrificed their lives to it. They were defeated so easily because mortals are no match for gods. Which is why Jung famously suggested that Alcoholics Anonymous make their members submit to a more benevolent higher power. I’ve met people who get hung up on what it means to submit to a higher power, but you can’t literalize these things. It’s the symbolism that saves most of us in the end, which is why we need religion, art, literature, theater, poetry, and music.
Not long after I spit out the bourbon cookie and heroically ground the rest up in the garbage disposal, I started listening to a podcast called Digital Jung. In the episode titled, How We Grow, the host—a Jungian analyst named Jason Smith—reads parts of, and powerfully analyzes, a Rilke poem called The Man Watching, which I promptly printed out and started reading every morning. (I like the Robert Bly translation.)
Here’s what I got from listening to Digital Jung and repetitively reading The Man Watching:
Rilke suggests that we too often choose to fight tiny things instead of allowing ourselves to be dominated by something much greater.
Rilke writes:
When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
Rilke goes on to make an Old Testament allusion to Jacob wrestling and being injured by an angel—and how that led to his transformation. Rilke celebrates this loss and suggests that:
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.
For most of my life, winning was paramount, but for the past seven years, I’ve been working on submitting.
At first, I submitted to human biology. I got humble enough to admit that my body was sick. I had to admit that I wasn’t a god who could drink and eat as much as I wanted without there being serious consequences. Then I tried to heal my body by listening to it, and giving it what health required—ceasing the consumption of alcohol, eating much better, and exercising more. That did not feel like winning at the time.
Then I entered into Jungian analysis, submitting to my wiser and more-learned analyst and the analytic experience, which began to relegate my ego—meaning I am slowly learning to stop putting at the center of my life’s story what I had always thought of as ME. The analytic process began to elevate the richness of my previously unexplored psyche, which slowly began to dwarf the more narcissistic ME story. This new submissive and respectful attitude allowed me to begin to more consciously interact with my unconscious. I started waking up at three AM to write down my dreams. My analyst and I studied the recurring symbols and patterns of my dreams, allowing both to guide the analysis. He had me draw pictures of my inner life for a time. Some with my non-dominant hand. We did active imagination together. We submitted to something bigger than ourselves and journeyed wherever it took us. Submitting to a process I couldn’t predict or control was not always fun. Education seldom is. To be honest, digging through my psychological baggage, facing my many flaws, and submitting to the change process was—at times—excruciatingly painful. And through much of it, a part of me often wanted to quit analysis and go back to the more ego-soothing ME-winning stories of my past.
I needed my wife’s encouragement. I needed my analyst’s guidance. I needed to surround myself with friends who—at the bare minimum—didn’t make any of the above harder. And I needed to get away from everything that and everyone who would collude with the seductive Scarlett-Johansson siren deep inside of me—the siren of Dionysus, who wanted to sing me toward just one more drink, A.K.A. my doom.
Mostly, I had to give up the bullshit lies in my life—all that had previously given me the illusion of safety—and get serious about learning the many things I did not know. Drunk me was very confident—that guy had all the answers. Sober me was not so sure. And that was progress. I stopped thinking of myself as a teacher and became a student again. I submitted to learning from my Jungian analyst, who had acquired way more knowledge—especially when it came to psychology—than I had thus far in life. And I began to see a truer version of myself whenever I looked in a mirror. I had to own the fact that I had been a child parading around as a man, and now was a man doing the arduous and unsexy remedial work of growing up in midlife.
Very slowly—and with many miles to go—I inch toward humility.
Over the past (almost) five years, my analyst and I have been mapping out what’s actually going on inside of me. What my past traumas had done to my brain’s software. I’m only recently beginning to see how the Scarlett-Johansson voice functions as a defense against those past traumas that were far too great for me to have faced at the time they transpired, back before I had begun doing all the work mentioned in this post. And I can see now how drinking was a quick and easy return to a childlike state—the time before the traumas. Babies and drunks both get bottles. And my drinking was an attempt to create the illusion of starting over, by reducing myself on a nightly basis to the mental state of a newborn, only to reawaken each morning in the dehydrated and bloated body of middle-aged man, who mostly just couldn’t wait to get through his day, so that he could start drinking again. The problem is that alcohol only ever produces drunken fantasies. Drunken fantasies are often temporarily enjoyable, but they tend to keep drinkers from growing into psychological maturity.
Because I needed a god to beat a god, my Jungian analyst encouraged me to rethink the religion of my childhood. (I was raised Methodist. And in my dreams, I often go back to my childhood church.) My analyst—who was raised Catholic but is not a practicing Christian—and I began to look at the symbolic truths of the many Christian stories I was taught as a child. We did not use the lens of morality to do this. Instead, we mined the psychological utility of these stories. For instance, we talked about how I needed to be psychologically born again. How the old drunk me needed to die. How giving up alcohol was a form of crucifixion. How it was a long slow death of the former me. How it had made me feel as though my former drinking buddies and even the gods had forsaken me. How owning my problem made me feel paraded around naked for all to see. Then we talked about how I needed to spend some time in hell, before I rose again. But that I would be washed clean of the past once I had gone through this psychological process, and I would be fully transformed—born again—on the other side of it.
Christ and Dionysus have similar stories. They are both sons of gods. They are both associated with wine. Christ, of course, famously turned water into wine. He also turned his own blood into sacred wine and asked his followers to drink. But the purpose of Christ’s blood is not to inspire divine madness, but to offer a rebirth, relegating the ego, and lifting up a spirit of humility and kindness and servitude, which frees us from the tyrannies of our egos. Unlike the ancient gods, my analyst tells me, Christ greatly cared about the least of we humans—enough to willingly sacrifice his life for the betterment of others. The wine that Jesus was offering did not lead to premature death, but to a resurgence of life and the promise of something eternal. He didn’t want to get us drunk, he wanted to cleanse us with his blood. That’s a better god for the recovering alcoholic in me.
Some scholars out there might argue that I have Dionysus all wrong and that he was not merely a god of drunken divine madness. But nuanced stories of Dionysus are not what live in my psyche. There have, of course, been many who have misinterpreted and gotten drunk off the stories of Jesus Christ. Such people have also done harm to others and themselves. I met a few power-drunk Christians in my childhood church. They are partially why I haven’t attended any religious service in decades. But—because I grew up in a Christian community—the stories of Christ are embedded in the heart of Matthew Quick. So my analyst and I built upon on that scaffolding. You need a god to beat a god, he told me, and Jesus is the god I have. He’s the god western civilization was built upon. The story of the crucifixion still breaks me to this very day—it cripples any sense of superiority I have inside of me. Christ is a greater being who will always—and decisively—defeat me and help me grow.
As I relegate the ego, submit to the analytic process, and allow myself to be defeated by the right god, my psyche slowly transforms in radical ways.
In short, I become strong enough to spit out life’s bourbon cookies and remain sober.
Here’s me on the seven-year anniversary of my sobriety—June 8, 2025:
I still wrestle with addiction. But I am no longer vainglorious enough to think I alone can bend the will of a god.
Rilke writes:
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
So I try to pick the right story, the right god; and I allow myself to be humbled. The wounded narcissistic parts of me do not like humility at all. They thrash about inside of me. They scream. They claw at my innards. They gnaw on my liver and spleen. They attempt to pierce my stomach. But they also continue to lose influence over me as I allow myself to be defeated by what Rilke calls “constantly greater beings.”
There is a spiritual-psychological war going on in every single one of us, regardless of whether we are paying attention to it or not.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate,” Jung tells us.
Here at seven years sober, I’m still working on that and will continue to battle for the rest of my life.
I’m grateful for the gift of bourbon-soaked cookies. It was the best present I received last Christmas. It forced me to confront all of the above, making unconscious conscious.
I don’t want to be a baby anymore.
I don’t want to escape my life; I want to live it.
If you are fighting a similar battle, I salute you.
Since we are all fighting this battle in one way or another, I salute you.
Your man in the Lowcountry,
Matthew
PS - Did you read the May 21st post? Unheralded But Life-Saving Acts of Kindness (What Stories Are You Feeding Your Soul?)