EPISODE 13 THE FREE AGENT

Shima met me unexpectedly at the airport. He had heard that I had signed with the advertising agency and was piiiiiiiissssed.

I tried to explain the situation, which was really just “Well, they offered me money and promised me fame and I was in.”

I wasn’t savvy enough to the politics or the proper chain of etiquette. I saw myself as a solo entity, talent for hire. Shima, however, felt like he had made me and thus he owned me.

But the agency was treating me like royalty, putting me up in the finest of hotels, feeding me the best of food. They didn’t know much about wrestling, though.

The first day, they had arranged a photo shoot—another lingerie shoot, to be exact. Having decided I wanted to make it to the big leagues, I needed to figure out this sex appeal thing and, in turn, would continue to do what I said I wouldn’t. On the flip side, I reasoned, Lita did, and she was still cool. And I worked hard for my body, why wouldn’t I show it off? I’m in better shape than the last time, I told myself.

As a side note, I believe there is nothing wrong with showing off your body and feeling the power of your own femininity and sexuality. However, I also knew that if I wanted to be respected as an athlete and a wrestler I had to have more than sex appeal. In fact, I felt like I needed to reject it completely.… Not that it mattered, because in my confusion I went against it all anyway.

The people at the shoot were lovely, of course, and this shoot was much more professional and classier than the last one.

However, the magazines they ended up in? Not so much. I was horrified, but also too meek to stand up and say anything to the agency.

“Very popular magazine,” they said.

Yeah… I can see why.…

It was the top porno magazine in Japan, and, as a result of my very Catholic upbringing and my intentions on how I wanted to be portrayed in general, I was mortified.

Meanwhile in wrestling… the agency had booked me on a show called The Woman, which included some of my idols. But I was facing a lady dressed like a bull.

The match was a blend of comedy and awful. I was out of my element. Between the language barrier and differing styles, it just didn’t hit the mark. And I wasn’t advertised or marketed in the same way Shima had done for me.

This was my one and only show on this trip and it sucked.

Shima met me after my match looking like the Godfather. I gave him a nervous smile, waiting for his disapproval.

“No good,” he remarked, as my organs turned into pretzels in my stomach.

He was right.

I trundled back to Ireland, ashamed of myself.

With bookings in the summer months beginning to slow and my interest in my physique growing, I decided I would do a bodybuilding competition in September in Dublin. I thought if I could look flawless, maybe one of the big companies would want me. I could prove that I could be “fluff” too.

Who had I become?!

Of course, I had no idea how to go about getting in bodybuilding shape. But I knew someone who might. When I was growing up, there was a man in my neighborhood named Niall. He was a mountain of a human being, with biceps as big as curled-up toddlers, complete with veins as prominent as computer cords. He was a good sixteen years older than I was, and as a kid I was terrified of this brooding behemoth as he drove around in his muscle cars, gigantic arm covered in ink hanging out the window, sunglasses covering his pouting face.

Scariness and all, I sent him a message letting him know about my latest goal to compete. As fate would have it, he was doing the competition too! He even agreed to come to my house to help me with a plan.

He arrived at my house and got out of his vehicle, looking less scary than I remembered; there was even warmth in his eyes. How had I missed that as a kid? I must have been distracted by the fear he might eat me.

He wrote me up a diet detailing how many ounces of chicken I could consume, my water intake, how many grams of rice, and for the love of god no sugar. Maybe an apple after training if I went hard enough.

Immediately, my days began to revolve around food and training. I became consumed by what and when I could eat next.

I bailed on wrestling, partially to lift weights and eat, but mostly out of pure insecurity. Having felt like I was losing my step in the ring, instead of running towards getting better, I was running away completely. I felt like I would find salvation in a set of abs and that that was more important for WWE than what I could do in the ring.

With the clock ticking down in my head and in an attempt to be productive, get back to America, and also have that plan B that had been so highly recommended by my mother, I started researching personal-training courses across the pond.

That would tick all the boxes! Becoming a personal trainer would grant me a visa and a purpose to be in America while allowing me to take bookings on the weekend.… And I get a diploma at the end of it!

I found a four-month program in Orlando that accepted foreign students and began in September.

Orlando also happened to be the home of TNA, which had a thriving women’s division. All things going to plan, this was going to be my in.

As my body fat decreased, the pain from wrestling increased. Hitting the mat and ropes with little padding to cushion the impact left me feeling tender for days. Not to mention I was wrestling infrequently now, so my body was losing its calloused shell that protected me from the pain of falling down for a living.

When the fat loss started to slow down, I cut my calories again to get to the next stage. Emaciation was the name of the game.

I was popping ephedrine like it was Skittles. When that stopped working, I was supplied with T₃, which is meant to speed up your thyroid function. But it can also be very dangerous and wreak havoc on your thyroid once you come off it.

Spoiler: it did.

I took another tour in Japan in my wilted state. But this time there would be no fancy hotels.

The advertising agency weren’t seeing a return on their investment, so they decided to downscale. The only reason they saw me as a star was because Shima had presented me like one. On my own, I was just a poorly dressed teenage girl who liked exchanging holds in a wrestling ring.

I spent my free time scouring grocery stores, trying to figure out what I could eat, which was usually boiled cabbage and boiled egg whites.

My matches were awful, and everything hurt like hell.

Shima didn’t even bother to come out and see me this time. I was a lost cause.

All I would do was fantasize about food I could eat when I was done. Like carrots, which were banned for their high sugar content. Fucking carrots!

I just wanted to go home. I lost sight of why I was doing any of this.

When I returned to Ireland, I still had another four weeks of this diet before the big bodybuilding show, which seemed like an eternity. I drank so much coffee and Diet Pepsi on top of my abundance of fat burners just to be able to get through a workout, and even then I would cry out of exhaustion.

My mother was panicking as I was dwindling away in front of her eyes. Sometimes she would catch me leering at cookbooks like a teenage boy who had discovered Playboy for the first time in his life.

As the days got more painful and my appearance became more frightful, I had enough. The competition was two more weeks away, but I couldn’t make it. I needed a cheat meal; I needed sugar in my veins and in my brain. Now!

Niall thought it might actually help kick-start my metabolism, or leave me so disgusted with myself that I’d go full bore for the remaining fortnight.

“Your stomach has probably shrunk, so you won’t be able to eat much,” Niall warned me as we walked into Eddie Rocket’s.

Niall was wrong. I could eat everything on my plate, his plate, everyone else in the restaurant’s plate, and all the food in the kitchen too.

We didn’t stop there, hitting up my favorite bakery for pastries I had been dreaming of for months. There was a panic in my eating. Like I was Cinderella and I had to stuff my face with as much sugar and fat as I could before the clock struck midnight and I’d turn into a pumpkin. There was a rush of adrenaline, or maybe that was sugar hitting. I was doing something I shouldn’t, but being wrong felt so right.

The futility of standing up in a bikini on a stage and showing people my muscles dawned on me as I consumed my cream-filled buns. What the hell am I doing? It wasn’t like I was going to win any money for my hard work. At best I would win a trophy, but by then I had just become a skinny girl with abs.

Like a pie to the face, it hit me that I was throwing everything away for this. But by then the eating disorder had already kicked in, and it was going to take years to shake.

The lack of food had a grave impact on my mood, hormones, and thyroid. Though I was once an upbeat, optimistic young girl with a clear road ahead of me, it all became murky as depression fogged everything around me.

In a power struggle to gain and lose control at the same time, I would binge eat, then purge, then diet as hard as I could, then repeat.

Cheat meals turned into cheat days, which turned into waiting till everyone was in bed and eating till I felt like I could puke and then making myself puke.

The narrative of “There’s far too many blond beauties around here for anyone to be looking at you” still haunted me and left me with an inadequacy complex that felt damn near impossible to shake.

What I liked about wrestling was that I had given myself worth beyond how I looked. Now that was all I cared about.