Before and After: Matt Raynor's Life, and Its Unexpected Turns, Chronicled in New Photography Book

Matt Raynor, self-admittedly, has changed. Even Myers-Briggs agrees.

Since he started taking the personality test, the 34-year-old has been an ENFP, an acronym for “Extraverted, Intuitive, Feeling and Perceiving” — their natural strengths leadership, communication and problem solving, while weaknesses can be focus, organization and restlessness.

“I’ve taken the test maybe 100 times, so for 10 or 12 years, I was one thing,” Raynor recently explained from his home in Southampton. “Just recently, I’ve taken it and I answered all the questions honestly, and I’m an ENTJ, which is the opposite of an ENFP.”

He paused. “My whole life, I’ve been a slave to my emotions,” he said, “and, finally, I’m not. I am different.”

Within him, there is a clear line of demarcation, he explained — one that is captured in a new photography book, “Before Me After Me,” written and compiled by his friend Craig Mowry, that chronicles his journey, from his work as a commercial fisherman to the day his world changed forever, and beyond.

“It’s an inspirational story and it should be shared, because it could really help people,” he said. “I believe that.”

Growing up in Hampton Bays, Raynor was never far from the water, between the weekend boat trips that he would take to Warner Island in Shinnecock Bay aboard his father’s boat, to clamming and scalloping, to surfing wherever he could find some action. He loved to travel and see the world, from Europe to South America to Asia.

Commercial fishing was a natural choice, he said, despite the 18-hour work days, where he was catching anywhere from 5,000 to 20,000 pounds of squid a week aboard The Perception, a 90-foot commercial fishing vessel out of Montauk.

But then, on April 18, 2019, his life came to a screeching halt.

Just one week before heading back out on The Perception for a month at sea, he decided to go swimming in the channel at Towd Point. It was a cloudy day and the cold water soothed his tendonitis. With enthusiasm, he dove in, again and again, off the bed of his pickup truck.

On his last dive, it all went wrong.

Instead of executing the move he had done countless times before, his head hit the channel floor and the strong moon tide started to drag a lucid, but unable to move, Raynor out to sea. The impact had broken his C3 vertebrae, which affected his ability to breathe, and he passed out in the water.

Sensing trouble, his friend Jerome Lucani jumped in and pulled Raynor to the shore, immediately administering CPR.

“Before I broke my neck, I was always searching out the most dangerous situations and then inserting myself into them. And I had done it for years,” Raynor said. “It’s no wonder I broke my neck. I’m surprised I did it the way I did it, but what would have happened if didn’t break my neck that day? I probably would have just died, or some shit, some other way.”

Airlifted to Stony Brook University Hospital, Raynor underwent spinal fusion surgery on his C3 to C7 vertebrae, starting just below his skull. In 2020, he spent nearly two months at the Shepherd Center in Atlanta, which specializes in spinal cord and brain injury rehabilitation. He received physical, occupational and recreational therapy, including gardening, fishing and photography.

“You can imagine such a traumatic event and being affected so physically,” he said, “going from somebody who’s so physical to somebody who’s just forced to sit and not run away from themselves and think about everything — think about their feelings, think about just everything — for five years.”

As a quadriplegic, Raynor was also forced to teach himself a new set of skills. That grew to include drone photography, which comprises the second half of the book — showing the East End, and himself, through a evolved lens, his images a symbol of resilience and strength.

“When I think about the accident, I never think of it in a negative light — ever,” he said. “I don’t think I ever have. It was just a very powerful, transformative experience for me that did something for me that I couldn’t do for myself in so many different facets. And then not only that, it’s grown into something so different.”

These days, according to Myers-Briggs, Raynor is an ENFP, which stands for “Extraversion, Intuition, Thinking and Judging.” While still a natural leader and creative problem solver, he is more decisive, thriving on momentum and accomplishment. He’s strategic and analytical, and a big-picture thinker, highly motivated when he has opportunities to set up long-term goals.

Which is precisely what he’s doing.

This month, Raynor expects to start online software engineering classes, building on his coding knowledge — all self-taught in the last year — as he works toward a new goal to be a web developer.

But that is just the start.

Raynor eventually aims to form a group to help people with disabilities obtain jobs in the tech sector, starting with him making video tutorials on how to move through the world as someone with a spinal cord injury — from relearning how to type on a computer to simply picking up items off the ground.

“No matter what you’re going through — physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually — there are things you can do to lessen the load,” he said. “Life is not going to be perfect for anyone. People are going to die, you’re going to get sick, you’re going to die; like the Buddha said, we’re bound to lose everything eventually, but that’s just part of the journey we’re on.

“Being able to deal with that and being able to be sick, and being able to be just profoundly physically suffering, you can still be happy. It’s possible. And I’d really like to find a way to convey that to people in an effective way, which is hard to do. It’s really hard to do.”

While Raynor is typically, and remarkably, upbeat given the unexpected turn his life has taken, he does not sugarcoat his day-to-day — or the bad days that come with the good. Last Thursday, he was having a rough time grappling with his recently diagnosed celiac disease and stress over the road ahead.

“When you’re uncomfortable and things don’t seem to be going right, or you’re just in pain, a lot of the time it’s the most important thing that could happen to you,” he said. “And then, if you try to run away from it, it just f---s your life up so much worse than if you just embrace it and feel it and think about why you’re feeling it, or why it’s happened, and just embrace it. It’s a lot easier.”

For more information about Matt Raynor and his new book, “Before Me After Me,” visit matthewraynor.com.