EPISODE 8 WE WANT TABLES

It wasn’t long after my momentous title victory that the audience was already getting sick of me. Or rather I was getting sick of me. Probably a combination of both.

It can be tough being a babyface champion. More so if you’ve been an underdog on the way to the top. Because if you’ve garnered popularity by overcoming the odds, what happens when you become the odds to overcome? Then it’s all just odd.

It didn’t help that my first title defense would be against Alexa Bliss, a tiny, sassy newcomer to the main roster who cosplayed different superheroes and pop culture icons. She was easy for the fans to get behind.

The noticeable size discrepancy didn’t help either, her standing at a mere five feet tall, making it difficult to put matches together. If I beat her up too much, I looked like a bully. She couldn’t overpower me because that would be silly.

It’s also hard for heels to do anything underhanded these days. We’ve become so sophisticated with our wrestling that we analyze (often overanalyze) everything and don’t want our referees to look like the bad guy/stupid, leading to an encyclopedia-sized list of rules we must adhere to, often resulting in cool bad guys who outsmart or outwrestle naive good guys.

It was stressing me out. I was already feeling the adrenaline dump of achieving my goals, but the realization that this was only the beginning of the hard work was daunting. I wanted to be not only a great champion but one who helped build people along the way. I just didn’t have a clue how to do it, and had no idea how to make these matches with Alexa any good. I wasn’t the best at “getting my shit in.”

Struggling, I asked the one person I knew who could come out of every situation looking great: Superman.

Aka John Cena.

“I’m having trouble trying to structure this match. I want us both to look good, but it’s hard when she’s so small.”

In his straight-to-the-point, wise Cena manner he answered immediately with no hesitation, “This is your time; make sure you take it. The young gymnast’s time will come.”

It was great advice. Cena has that Tibetan monk sage–type quality to him. But I had absolutely no idea how to put it into practice.

To make matters slightly more complicated, for several weeks I had been putting off attending to a large lump that had been growing on my right side. Feeling the pressure of being a brand-new champ, I didn’t want to get checked out lest I have to come off television, and hoped it would just go away on its own.

However, the week of my first big title defense on PPV I landed in Nashville after a loop and was going to see the nice boy I was forcing the connection with—only the lump had grown so big and so painful that I had to go straight to the ER.

It turned out to be a cyst that had abscessed and had to be cut out immediately.

I was put under local anesthesia and given additional pain medicine, neither of which seemed to help at all, resulting in the most pain I have ever experienced as I was cut open.

The drugs didn’t kick in till after. But, oh, when they did, I felt marvelous.

“Can I wrestle?” I asked, drugged out of my mind. “Wrestle” is a real slurry word when you’re fucked-up.

“Sorry, what?”

“Wressstttllllleeee.” It felt like my mouth was filled with bubble gum and dish soap.

“Can I wres-uuuullll this weekend?”

“Wrestle? Absolutely not,” the doctor responded, decoding my word soup.

Well, shit. My first title defense and I would miss it. If I weren’t so high, I might feel like a failure.

When I sobered up, I felt like my body had let me down, or that I had energetically brought this on myself. I didn’t own being the champ the way I should have and got what I deserved. I was letting everyone down: the crowd, the company, and especially myself.

If nothing else, though, the nice boy looked after me and took care of me. So what if we couldn’t talk about much beyond food and training? He was sweet. And after he drove me to the ER, I decided I would make the risky choice to move out of Orlando and up to Nashville to be with him once my lease was up in a few weeks.

What’s the worst that can happen? I thought.

When I returned to work after taking a week off, they used the ailment in the story line in the most detrimental way possible, saying I was a chicken with a “yellow spine” who was just trying to get out of a fight I knew I couldn’t win. That might be all fine and well for a heel to say if they didn’t back it up in the booking. Alexa beat me down and literally sprayed a yellow streak down my spine. This whole story line was killing me as a babyface and I couldn’t wait to get out of it.

To this day I still go, “Lads. What were you thinking?”

And they’d probably go, “You try writing two live TV wrestling shows every week for fifty-two weeks a year with no vacations and little thanks and see how you like it!”

To which I would retort, “Fair point.”

At least I was going to win my first title defense when it did happen in a tables match at the TLC PPV. As icing on the cake, this was a historical match in some ways. There had never been a singles tables match for ladies in WWE. Finally, after an underwhelming run, this would be how I would turn this whole shitty championship reign around.

Then the call came in.

It was 12:06 pm on a Friday and I was in the Performance Center training—I was a bundle of anxiety thinking about this move to Nashville. My gut was kicking in to let me know I was making a giant mistake; this relationship was never going to work out. We were completely different people. Everything that could go wrong in the moving process was going wrong. I couldn’t get ahold of the movers, I wasn’t going to be able to get anything out of my apartment in time, and they had already rented my place to other people. But instead of canceling the whole thing, I barreled right on through, constantly repeating to myself, What’s the worst that can happen? It’s all an adventure, like Dad says!

Work-wise, I felt like I was failing miserably.

This call cemented it.

“We’re going to put Alexa over at TLC, but don’t worry; you’ll win it back at Royal Rumble.”

You won’t put the title back on me at Rumble was my first thought. I was never championship material. This was a one-and-done situation, I was convinced of it, and I had messed it all up by doubting myself. And now I’m moving somewhere I don’t want to with someone not right for me. It’s all going wrong.

“But why?” I asked, riddled with fear, guilt, and sadness.

“We don’t think anyone will expect it.”

Well, yeah, sure, they wouldn’t expect that you would have given me the shittiest title run possible, but here we are! I thought in my anger but thankfully didn’t vocalize. I wanted to escape my body and all the anger, the anxiety, the feelings of failure, the feelings of being trapped. But where could I go? There wasn’t another body I could hop into. And if there was, my same stupid mind would be there to tell me how awful I am anyway.

If this all sounds very dramatic for fake losing a fake title that I fake won, that’s because it is. But in a world that depends on suspending disbelief, sometimes we suspend our own. And though nothing is life-or-death, it feels like life-or-death for the character you have birthed. A bad creative or an unexpected loss feels like it could kill them.

Or, more simply, this fake scenario was making me feel like a real-life loser. I had built up being a champion to almost something ethereal. Something that felt unrealistic for me to hold.

Alexa was being given the media time and the interview time in advance of the PPV. I was the champ in name only.

Nevertheless, despite losing, I wanted to give my all.

But I had no idea how to have a tables match. I didn’t even know how to set up a damn table.

Thankfully, Bray Wyatt, the charismatic cult-like leader of the faction The Wyatt Family and all-around gem of a human, pulled me aside to show me how to pick up tables and how to structure the match, and he and I put most of the match together.

I spent hours with him, flipping the tables, working with the wood and steel, trying to make it look as if I had been doing it my whole life. Sucking splinters out of my fingers and no-selling my bruised and cut shins from flipping the heavy tables.

Meanwhile Alexa was talking to ESPN, premonitioning her inevitable win.

Despite the advanced effort I’d put in, because we hadn’t had much time to practice together, the match ended up being clunky and quite frankly shite.

We had our match in Dallas, the same place where I had had my big WrestleMania match. At WrestleMania I felt like I had won, even in my defeat. But this loss felt so much more hopeless. I crashed through the table, which felt strangely poetic, considering how I was feeling in life at that moment.