When my father kissed my cheek and gave me away, I realized sometimes, if you’re lucky, you get exactly the love you need.
What I had learned about love throughout my life was enough to make me question its resilience. But I had also learned that it could be worth the risk. And I had grown confident in my knack of leaping without looking.
I found the person who complemented me like no other. I met my match, my best friend, my dream guy. Like our customary traded coffee, he could be bright and sweet or dark and bitter, but always hot…and never far from my mouth. Getting married just felt like the right thing to do. There was no louder, more meaningful way to dedicate ourselves to partnership. Phil likes to tease that if I hadn’t been so mean to him all the time back then, we would’ve been married two years earlier. But I don’t think I was (always) mean; I think I was scared. Something in me knew he could be the one, and the promise of stability can be terrifying. Because with the comfort of stability comes the fear of losing it.
But ironically, the best relationships will make you more independent. A good man will love you so much, he will remind you of how immensely worthy of love you are. A secure man will love you because you love yourself first. I knew I was ready for marriage because I was comfortable with being alone. I am self-assured enough to know I will not be broken or less than without a ring on my finger. But when you don’t need someone, you get the privilege of choosing them. You get to choose each other every day. And what is more meaningful than that? With loyalty, understanding, and a little bit of work, we will make that choice until we are wrinkly and gray, him long before me. I have never believed in forever, but now I hope for it.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that marriage is not the only way to live happily ever after, but if you’re lucky enough to find someone who stimulates your mind as successfully as your loins, lock that shit down.
Phil mercilessly mocked me for having to dress up like a girl for my TV story-line wedding. Sucker.
• Reject every guy who approaches you. Even if he was just going to ask for the time, reject him anyway. If he keeps trying, he must really like you.
• Remember that a partner will only respect you as much as you respect yourself.
• Don’t go looking for it. If Fate is real, tempt her by declaring you are willing to die a virgin and live comfortably in your asexual sweat suits.
• Have a kick-ass career. It’ll be hard to give a shit about the other side of the bed being empty when it’s filled with stacks of cash, keeping you warm.
How to Keep Love
• Consistently knock your partner down a few notches. Not so far down they lose the confidence you first found attractive, but just far enough to remind them they will never do better than you.
• Openly talk about poop.
• In the Marry/Fuck/Kill game of life, be all three.
• Be okay losing it. You are the prize that must be won.
How to Know He’s the One
• If he always holds your hand when you cross a street.
• If he brings you coffee in bed every morning, because he knows without it, you are a monster.
• If he leaves you sweet notes literally everywhere: under your pillow, in your books, in your luggage, sometimes between the bread of a sandwich.
• If he always opens the car door for you. Manners are sexy as hell.
• If he forgives you for that time you went jogging together and you pulled ahead and screamed, “Help! He’s chasing me!”
• If he thinks you are the most beautiful with no makeup on and frizzy air-dried hair.
• If he adopts the dog you’ve been eyeing to help you recover from surgery. (And even though you worry what he brought home might actually be a chupacabra, or an old man that has been cursed by a gypsy, you raise him as your son anyway.)
• If he buys you a car, but it ends up being the biggest fight you ever have because you are irrationally defensive of your independence, so he reluctantly trades it in and forgives your ungrateful response.
• If you mention ice cream at 10 p.m., and he quietly sneaks out to buy you ice cream at 10:02.
• If he is not intimidated by the fact that Momma has her own bank account and pays her own bills.
• If he has always made you feel like the prettiest girl in the room, even when you were just friends. Even when you were mean to him.
• And most important, if he waits until you pause the video game to walk past the TV. That guy’s a keeper.
I fear children. Mostly because I worry that they will fall into a pile of broken glass or set themselves on fire while in my charge. But also because they can be unpredictable. And the last thing I want is a pair of creepily tiny and inexplicably sticky hands moving haphazardly in my general direction. I am hesitant about having children the same way I used to be hesitant about getting married, so perhaps this too shall pass. But I’m not ready to share my action figures with anyone else just yet.
So unsurprisingly, when the WWE presented me with the opportunity to speak at a school assembly composed of over a hundred children under the age of twelve, I politely replied, “Fuck that noise.” But after I realized the event was a part of a well-intentioned antibullying campaign meant to spread the message of tolerance and acceptance within schools, as well as completely mandatory, I jumped in with both feet.
Upon arriving at the middle school, I was brought into an empty classroom and handed a thick, extensive handbook filled with pages of integral information: hundreds of conversation starters, frequently asked questions, and a structured discussion outline. A course guide so detailed, carrying such an important message we were entrusted to convey to impressionable minds during their formative years, would take a rigorous amount of studying and preparation.
“Can you read this in twenty minutes and head out there?”
“I’m sorry, what now?” I hoped the event coordinator was making a terribly cruel joke.
“You’ll be fine. Trust me, most of this stuff comes naturally. And if you need us to take over the conversation, just give us a signal and my team will take care of any code red.” She laughed.
For a while, it seemed as if I might actually be pulling off the impossible. I had wrangled the kids’ attention and they were actually pretty responsive. They even laughed at my jokes, presumably because those jokes were finally being heard by a demographic of equal maturity. I thought while I had them smiling it would be a good time to start a Q&A session. Kids love when they have to stand up and be vulnerable among their peers. I spotted a sweet little girl wearing a thick pair of glasses in the crowd. She couldn’t have been older than ten and was preciously tiny.
Sitting quietly, fiddling with the hem of her dress, she seemed a delicate introvert, almost sad. Perhaps the assembly was striking a nerve. Maybe she was a victim of bullying or knew someone who was. I thought, I will help this girl find her strength. I will give her support in front of her whole school and give her a chance to finally speak up. I’m so great at this!
“Tell me, how would you help a friend who is a victim of bullying?” I asked the gentle wallflower, as an event participant handed her a live microphone. As three different cameras circled the girl hoping to get footage for a promotional reel about the company’s charitable efforts, she nervously pushed at her glasses. “Well…Bitches be trifflin’!”
Code red. CODE RED.
The microphone, for some reason, had not been pulled away, and so the tiny mobster continued, “Sometimes you just gotta slap a bitch if you want to shut her up.”
My eyes bounced around the room searching for an event coordinator to save me. Didn’t they say I just had to signal for them to swoop in? Wait…did we even designate a signal? I feel like hyperventilating should be a pretty strong signal. How could this be happening with all my extensive training?
Help never came and/or I blacked out, but somehow we stumbled through the rest of the assembly. Ultimately, I doubt the correct response to that c
omment was in the handbook.
But what really worried me was the instinctual response of a mere ten-year-old girl when asked about her confrontations with her peers. That was a hard B she responded with. At the tender age of ten she had learned to use a word so full of hate and spite. She had learned to view her fellow female race as enemies. And conflict between them was to be solved with aggression and violence.
After getting into so many scuffles in school, I finally saw how terrifying adults must have found me. But I was more worried about the word bitch being on the tip of a child’s tongue. It was an attitude so deeply entrenched in our culture, so ingrained in the lessons passed down, a child had learned to use it as a weapon.
If society disagrees with a woman’s opinion, finds her anything but pleasant, or views her as a threat, the go-to response is to call her a bitch. There are so many men who will instinctively hurl this insult at women, but I’ve already discussed men’s violent behavior toward women. What is truly painful to witness is when women use this word to attack other women.
We already have so many obstacles to overcome just trying to be seen and treated as equal to men that it seems laughable that women would further try to tear one another down, instead of unite to make the uphill climb a little bit easier. It seems we are getting in our way.
Throughout my career I have had women try to sabotage, manipulate, and trash-talk me. But I’ve just never had the will to respond in kind. I went to a wonderful high school full of warm, supportive, and encouraging men and women, so maybe I just missed the years in which childish behavior is prevalent. But it was in high school that I realized how important it was to come together in order to become stronger.
My public school was in an underprivileged town, full of kids who were desperate to make a better life for themselves. And in our united struggle, we knew not to make life harder for anyone else, but to try to raise us all up. The football team played ticketed games to help raise money for the Drama Club. Cheerleaders, artists, and Honor Society presidents were all members of the “Key Club,” a group designed to organize charitable functions, grow our school library, and mentor younger grades. My own Peer Mediation group gave up their meager allowances to help me go to college. It was there I learned the very cheesy but very truthful idea that standing united yields stronger results than trying to tear one another down.
As not just women, but women in a competitive field, facing generalizations, discrimination, and misogyny from a thousand different angles, the only way to survive and succeed would be to work together. And from what I’ve noticed in wrestling, the women who could not come to grips with that notion essentially shot themselves in the foot.
One of the reasons I was constantly utilized on-screen, always in a main event angle and working with the best in the industry, was simply because I was easy to work with. I did not perpetuate girl-on-girl violence. I was not the kind of girl who was going to cry when I had to lose or the kind of girl who was going to barge into a boss’s office and demand I not work with a particular competitor. I would not rat out anyone’s bad behavior. But these were prevalent tactics of the less successful.
That’s not to say I didn’t confront a woman if there was a problem. I fully admit that I can be brutally honest and that it doesn’t rub everyone the right way. But I never tweeted about my confrontations, talked about them in interviews, or whispered about them to my friends. A real woman has the strength of character to face conflict head-on, carry herself politely throughout it, and to move on when she’s said all she has to say.
I am comfortable telling women how I feel, but a lot of women are not comfortable being confronted. I think the only way men will stop making cartoon cat noises when women disagree is if women can learn to embrace conflict, instead of talking harshly about another female the instant she has left a room. Overall, I prefer talking shit to someone’s face. We don’t need to yell and scream and insult each other. We simply need to have the guts to say “I don’t like you” or “I don’t like this thing you did,” let it go, and continue being fair, civil, and collaborative.
I don’t think it is a coincidence that the most success I have ever had has been when I and another woman decided to do everything in our power to support each other. It was our mission to make each other look good.
My friendship with fellow female wrestler Kaitlyn, real name Celeste, has been well documented on camera. On paper, we should not have been friends. I was the wrestling purist. She was a fitness model the company begged to sign on. I spent two years in FCW before making it to TV, while she spent exactly two weeks. The canceled story line I was supposed to have on my SmackDown debut was given to her for NXT. A show she went on to win. She got to travel the world while I died a slow death in FCW. Though we seemed like complete opposites and destined enemies, we were startlingly alike in personality and became almost obnoxiously attached at the hip. Often literally, as Celeste would carry me through the halls of each arena while I straddled her like a clingy child. We traveled hundreds of miles a week together, roomed together, laughed at inside jokes annoyingly loud while coworkers blankly stared at us, and often washed each other’s hair in the locker room sink. No one could believe that when we eventually got married, it wasn’t to each other.
She, too, would experience a different kind of pressure at work. Celeste was jacked like the forbidden love child of Wonder Woman and She-Ra. Higher-ups were concerned her muscles would be too intimidating and relegated her position on TV until she could slim down. On a live show, she took part in a multiwoman battle royal. The goal of a battle royal was to knock each opponent out of the ring until one person was standing inside of it. That woman would be given a shot at the championship. Celeste, a beast, hit our friend and intended winner of the match, Eve Torres, so hard she accidentally knocked her out of the ring and won the match. Oh, Convenient Circumstance, we meet again.
A TV segment involved cosplaying as Celeste who I assumed was cosplaying as Sonya Blade.
While a bunch of pissed-off people gathered backstage, I ran into Celeste’s arms like she had just come back from Vietnam, and we laughed so hard people started to give us dirty looks. Eve ended up laughing it off as well. Maybe because she was a rational human or maybe because she had a lot of other things going for her, like having a genius IQ or always looking so beautiful I am convinced cartoon birds from a Disney movie help her get dressed in the morning. Either way, she was cool with the accidental story-line change.
When Celeste was actually awarded the championship, I cried like a proud momma. I was honored to be her opponent in her tryout, fierce competition in her first televised match on NXT, and the first person to hug her once that title was wrapped around her waist. No one deserved that moment more.
But her moment would be bittersweet. At the time, even being the champion wasn’t a guarantee for television segments. The role of a female competitor was still being limited to one-minute to three-minute matches with a little story built around them to captivate the audience in the least.
I was fortunate enough to still be embroiled in story lines that were prominent, because they heavily featured men. I got to leave Daniel Bryan at the altar and then, just moments later, be chosen by Vince McMahon to run the Raw show as general manager. The original plan for the wedding segment was for psychiatric orderlies to drag me away after a ring was on my finger, and though I was initially bummed I didn’t get to channel my inner Harley Quinn, I loved getting the opportunity to be a five-foot-two boss of giants. Though I be but little…
After that I got to be a part of another romance story line with the company’s top star, John Cena, who had been a mentor and supporter from my first days on the road. I then had my long-awaited bad guy turn with fellow heels Dolph Ziggler and Big E Langston. Dolph and I got to play our very own version of Mickey and Mallory, and the three of us produced both hilarious and controversial TV segments. The opportunities were plentiful and appreciated. The company execs found not only that they
could count on me to deliver in performance, but also that I had become a top attraction with the crowd. The next logical move was to put me in the title chase.
I could not have written my dream scenario any better. I was getting to work with my best friend in wrestling. And because so little attention was being paid to the women’s division, we were accidentally given a lot of creative control. Writers who were considered lower-tier were assigned to work with us, and they were so cool and open-minded, it became more of a collaboration. I felt like I was finally using the creative writing muscles I had long abandoned. Being able to use the power of my mind reminded me of a strength and value I had forgotten about. Though, occasionally, giving us free rein on dialogue produced ridiculous results like this backstage segment:
Crazy Is My Superpower: How I Triumphed by Breaking Bones, Breaking Hearts, and Breaking the Rules Page 22
