EPILOGUE THE DARK MATCH

What followed SummerSlam in 2021 and into 2022 is what I consider my favorite year in wrestling. As a heel, I finally felt the freedom to do what I want. To say what I want. To not take myself too seriously or have to answer to anyone’s expectation.

I had a new perspective on life and work. I was there to build my opponent and tell the best story I could and hopefully take an entertaining ass kicking while I was at it.

Wrestling is my art. And I’m damn good at it, even if I’m not the most technically proficient artist in the world. My body is my paintbrush, the ring is my canvas, and the moves are my paint. Within there are my opponents—different strokes with different folks—but it’s all art, and whatever the onlooker thinks of it is up to them. But for me, I just want a body of work and a portfolio I am proud of.

Even though I was back to being on the road four days a week, every week of the year, I had my new little family with me the whole time. Sure, it meant dragging a tiny baby to Saudi Arabia and back again twice, or to and from the UK several times and on planes several times a week. It meant not sleeping through the night one single night all year. Or sometimes not sleeping at all the night before big PPVs. I was juiced up on all the love I could handle… at home.… The audience mostly hated me or at least played along. Twitter is where the real hostility happens. Where avatars in droves told me how awful I was. I might hate me too. What with my beautiful little baby, hot-ass husband, and dream job, life has been fucking good.

Of course, it was not without its hiccups. I fractured my goddamn trachea. Mine and Charlotte’s heated rivalry reached the boiling point when we had one of the shittiest segments in SmackDown history, when during a title exchange I felt she deliberately went off script, leading to me yelling in gorilla that she was a, to use my exact words, “crafty fucking cunt” right in front of Vince and a plethora of onlookers and her denying it was intentional emphatically.

And yeah, Sasha and Naomi walked out of Raw right as it went on air when we were meant to main event that night, leading to a whole bunch of chaos, but they had their reasons and that is their book to write.

Vince suddenly retired from the company, after being all I’d ever known of WWE and in many ways is responsible for the life I have now and my lovely little family.

I was able to have my dream match with my teenage hero and friend Lita in Saudi Arabia, where once women weren’t allowed to have matches at all.

Bianca and I were able to pay off her quick loss by stealing the damn show, if I do say so myself, at WrestleMania 38 in Dallas, the same place I had my first WrestleMania match six years earlier, and I got to give her her championship back. Ultimately, our feud continued to SummerSlam that year, where I would finally turn back babyface but also separate my shoulder. Which in a weird way was a blessing.

And my little girl has been there to see it all, oblivious to her unique way of life. I get to be her constant. When everything around us is shifting, through never-ending airports and hotels, living on buses and in different cities every night, her momma is always there to put her to bed at night, to comfort her when she wakes up.

I have learned many things on my journey, many of which are your usual clichés. That it’s always about the journey and not the destination. That change is always possible, and things are only impossible until someone does them. That nothing outside of ourselves can bring lasting happiness. More than anything, I have learned that my biggest enemy has always been self-doubt and that when I have been able to free myself from its irritating shackles and had the courage to trust my inner compass, wonderful things can happen.

I had never considered myself successful, always striving to do more, be more, chase more. That hamster wheel had become pretty exhausting until I realized I have everything I wished for since I was a kid. My family, my dream job, my friends. For the girl who was always so average in every aspect of life—average height, average weight, average anxieties, average grades, average upbringing—I have gotten to do some most unaverage things.

I am not your average average girl.