Picture this: it’s 6:00 on a Saturday night in August. You’re driving. The road isn’t busy, and you’re stopped at a stop sign. You look left, then right. In your head, you tell yourself you can go because no cars are coming. As you’re about to go, you’re propelled forward. There’s a loud crunching noise, followed by screeching. You feel your head lurch forward and whip back, like your head is a swivel on top of your neck. You don’t know what’s happened, but you’re in the middle of the road. You look up, into your rear view mirror, and see a pickup truck on top of you. And that’s when you realize what’s happening, and everything is about to change. One moment. One single moment in time, and the course of your life has now been irrevocably changed forever. You don’t know it just yet, but you will wake up tomorrow with everything taken away from you. All of it, gone. In an instant. Just like that.
This is the story of what happened to me on August 5, 2017. That night, my whole life flashed before my eyes. I saw it on a reel, but it came and went as quickly as a shooting star. Some of you may already be aware of the injuries I sustained when I was rear ended by a drunk driver who, quite literally, came out of nowhere. I suffered injuries to my neck, left shoulder, left wrist, and right hip. As I write this today, a little over 2 years later, I am still suffering from both my neck and shoulder injuries. In February of 2018, I had to have shoulder surgery to fix a torn posterior labrum, a torn superior labrum, a dislocated shoulder, and also to repair the tissue that was stretched from my shoulder dangling out of its’ socket for nearly six months. Unfortunately, the surgery didn’t fix everything my doctor and I thought it would, but I will save that story for another time.
At the time of my accident, I was pursuing my dream of becoming a professional wrestler. Unsurprisingly, after that fateful night, that dream suddenly came to a halt. As the months slowly passed following the accident, I had to deal with the loss of everything in my life. I could no longer pursue my dream, my passion, the one thing that lit my soul on fire. I was out of work, my boyfriend and I were having problems. I felt so lonely, and I felt my body becoming weaker and weaker with each passing day.
Over the summer, someone asked me how I ended up picking myself up after everything.
When I first started wrestling, I said to someone that wrestling was my life. It was everything. It was my whole world. They looked at me and told me: “you can’t make wrestling your whole world, you need to have a life outside of wrestling.” I didn’t understand it at the time, but now I do.
When I lost everything, I had to look at myself in the mirror and ask myself this: who am I without all of the things I love? When you are left with nothing but shattered pieces of a broken life, of broken hopes and dreams, you have no choice but to answer that question. Suddenly, I found myself circling back to the advice I’d been given months before everything happened: “you can’t make wrestling your whole world, you need to have a life outside of wrestling.” I looked at my life, down at the discarded pieces of it, and realized that I, in fact, did not disppear simply because I’d lost everything in my life. I was still here, still breathing, still me.
It started slowly, the reassembling of myself, and somewhat unknowingly. I’d started picking up books again—a habit that I’d always loved but had fallen away from—because reading gave me refuge from the mess of my life. What I didn’t know was that reading was helping keep that spark of creativity alive. The creative aspect of professional wrestling was what really made me fall in love with it. Reading, in turn, inspired me to start writing again; another passion of mine that I hadn’t pursued in awhile. But most importantly, I had to work on healing myself from the inside out. Losing everything made me finally identify my own personal issues and PTSD; the things that had quietly slipped their way into my relationship, my confidence, and my self-love.
Night after my shoulder surgery, February 8, 2018
When you are all alone, or feel all alone in the world, you have ample time to think. Once I’d finally identified and admitted my own issues to myself, I was able to work on them, fix them, and move on with my life. I found myself gaining more and more self confidence, self-love. I found myself looking at the world in a whole new way. I was no longer looking at things through tinted sunglasses that had professional wrestling at the core of it—and that was when I finally understood it. I finally understood why that person had told me that I needed to have a life outside of wrestling, why I couldn’t make it my whole world. It was because nothing is guaranteed in life, and it can change in an instant—quicker than the blink of an eye, gone and irreversibly changed at the speed of a shooting star. And when that happens, you will still be there. You can’t let anything except for yourself define who you are.
Dinner in a sling, Feb, 2018 
Valentine’s Day, 2018 
Valentine’s Day, 2018
Looking back now, I can see that that time period was the beginning of major self-growth journey, one that has taken me to where I am today. In that time, I learned a lot about myself, and healed the parts of me that were broken. I can finally answer the question I asked myself years ago: who am I without all of the things I love? Well, I’m a woman who loves to laugh and enjoys drinking champagne, rosé, and wine. I’m a creative soul and an ocean lover. I’m a blogger, avid reader, and aspiring author. I’m also someone who’s heart will always lie with professional wrestling. I’m a girlfriend, daughter, sister, and friend. I’m a girl who has survived severe bullying, an asbuive relationship, and overcome trauma. I’m unapologetically myself; loud, extra, and with (somewhat) expensive taste 😉 I’m a person who goes to church on Sundays and still believes in the power of healing crystals, the Earth and its’ natural vibrations. And so much more.
Quite simply? I’m me. And I’m pretty damn proud of that. Flaws and all. 💎
