I’m fascinated by stories of abrupt, drastic life changes. They light up the far corners of what’s possible. That knowledge can be scary or hopeful, depending on how you feel about change.
The change Matt Rafferty made would stretch plausibility in fiction, but he did it and he’s still living it decades later.
I met Matt in Anchorage, Alaska, where he had become a leader in the environmental movement and an impresario of a huge, non-profit story-telling show, among many other busy community roles. On stage or on the radio he projected mischievous joy and camp-counselor energy.
He had become this person two decades earlier through a conscious decision.
Matt grew up in Reading, Massachusetts, north of Boston. He got an accounting degree and spent his days looking after the books of a real estate firm. He spent his evenings in bars watching games on TV. He was a fat, beer-drinking bro, obsessed with sports, feeling superior to other people, always buzzed.
“I was super closed-minded, super chauvinistic,” he recalled.
The moment of change came when he was watching his UMass team during March Madness with a bunch of yelling former college buddies. Their team lost and they became despondent, convinced their year had been ruined.
Matt suddenly realized how stupid that was. He immediately made a change.
He took a personality test and realized he was in the wrong job. He quit and went to Wyoming to work at Grand Teton National Park. He spent his days talking to guests and adventuring outdoors with friends. He didn’t have money to drink, so he hiked every day and lost forty pounds.
When he came home at the end of the summer, he had no interest in his former life. He moved to Vermont. Four years later he moved to Alaska. He got into public radio, the local music scene, and just about everything.
“You can make anything you want to happen, happen, here,” he said.
That was years ago. Matt’s been through many more stages. He has accomplished a lot and lived an overstuffed life. No one now could imagine him as a boring bar fly. Indeed, his friends in Boston didn’t recognize him after that one summer in Wyoming.
I love Matt’s story, because it is completely positive. A young man noticed one night that he didn’t like his life, so he went out and changed it. The resources he needed were all inside him, he just needed an idea.
The relevance to writing?
The blank page in front of you is a lot like the next day of your life. Theoretically, we are all free, but what we’ve been taught and what we think people expect from us constrains how we use our freedom.
Most of us rarely think about the possibilities. We never check the boundaries of what’s possible.
You can write just about anything. There’s no promise anyone will read it, but that’s not a reason to hold back. You never know what might happen if, like Matt, you simply make the decision to go.
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