OFF-CAM

January 30, 2023

It was one of the most stressful nights of my career, for obvious reasons. I was in the locker room alone looking at the three championship belts that I already had up to this point knowing that I was about to fight for a fourth… and to be a quadruple champion. I can still remember all the armchair quarterbacks talking about who was going to win that match.

Ross this, SIlver that.

Holden Ross is the one with all the momentum in the world, I would hear.

Sierra Silver is the one that should’ve been the face of Madness from the start, said another one of those ‘armchair quarterbacks.

If it wasn’t praise for my opponents, it was criticism of me.

Myra’s just the third wheel.

Myra is only here after a fluke ladder match win at We Are Relentless.

Myra did nothing but choke when it mattered the most in SIn City Wrestling so why would this be any different?

Myra doesn’t have what it takes to be a brand leader.

And I’m not going to lie. That type of stuff did weigh in on my mind. I didn’t care so much for all the hype that was surrounding my opponents. But the scars of Sin City Wrestling, even though I had been doing great since I walked out of that company, even though I was a triple champion up to this point, hadn’t fully healed. I was still experiencing them, even at this point.

I can still remember all of the anger I was feeling on the day I left that place knowing full well that they didn’t give two fucks about me and were just happy for me to take up space and be the stepping stone for other people.

“I don’t care what anyone else says…” my sister Adrianna told me while we hung out in the locker room that night. She, her husband and her twin daughters joined me on the trip considering that a trip to an ocean island during the middle of winter was too good to pass up. “..you want this a hell of a lot more than your two opponents combined.”

“That’s true…” I said with a sigh. “But, as you know, passion isn’t a guaranteed win and it sure as hell isn’t always enough. I wanted it more than Amber, Mikah and Roxi, but that didn’t matter did it?”

Adrianna merely rolls her eyes and laughs.

“Fuck them all. Are any of them here, Myra?”

“They’re not.”

“Exactly. Look, I know that you went through a bunch of shit over at that other place, but this is your night. If there is one night where you can make them realize what they missed out on with you, then this is it. You have to remember that after you left, you were written off. You had pundits and pussies hiding behind their keyboards saying that you were about to collapse and that without Sin City Wrestling, you were about to be nothing.”

I could only chuckle for a bit, in bemusement over the fact that they turned out to be way wrong on that front.

“Right now, I feel like I am the glue that holds Madness together…” I admitted. I was certainly feeling a slight burden on my shoulders. The burden was light enough to where it didn’t feel like it was overwhelming for me, but also heavy enough for me to notice. “...I can’t let that title go to Sierra Silver or Holden Ross. I can’t. Neither one would be the best thing for this show. They’ve been feuding, so seemingly everything is about them and I’m just the ‘woman that failed to break the ceiling in SCW’ in comparison.”

“You’re doing it again, Myra…” Adrianna said with an annoyance in her voice. “I understand that healing takes time and I totally get that eight months away from that toxic place isn’t exactly long enough to fully heal, but if you’re going to win this match, you’re just going to have to forget about all that. And you know, I worry about your odds of winning this if I am the one that has to be telling you something you should already know. You know how much I give a shit about your opponents? Zero! It’s not like either one has done anything to make me give a shit about them. They’re just names, Myra. They’re names that are bigger than they actually are because of reputations in other places but other than winning stuff to qualify for this match, what have they actually… you know… done?”

“I’m sorry… you’re right.” I snapped out of my own pain at this point. “Still, I can’t let either of them win. Holden Ross only gives a crap about himself and the guy would drive this brand straight into the ground. Sierra Silver? This is just a side project to her and really… I don’t know why she’s even a big deal anyway. There’s not a damn thing about her that I find special and she’s sat on her laurels, barely doing a damn thing for months.”

“If you want my opinion, I think they’re both overrated. Oh man, it’s a good thing we’re not on the air right now talking on my podcast. Hot takes aplenty! Look, we both know that when it comes to what’s best for Madness, it’s you. We both know that the best thing that can happen to the IDL Cham…”

Adrianna stops in confusion the moment that the title name gets brought up.

“...I…D…L… that’s the name of the title?”

“Yeah, it is.”

Adrianna lets out an exasperated sigh.

“...what in the FUCK does IDL stand for? Did someone in the clerical department mean to put “IDK” as in I Don’t Know, and they fucked it up and did “IDL” as a typo instead? No SERIOUSLY, what the FUCK does that STUPID name stand for?”

“Honestly? I have no idea…”

“Like this whole MILF of Madness shit isn’t embarrassing enough… and you need to start speaking up about that. But, that’s besides the point. Listen, you’re winning tonight, okay? You’re better than you’ve ever been. You want this a hell of a lot more than the other two do. You’ve learned from what’s gone wrong before…”

Adrianna sits down next to me and even grabs my hand. We lock eyes at this point.

“... I understand that your experiences at Shit City Wrestling…”

“Adri…”

“Well they’re shit, Myra…” she says as she rolls her eyes. “...and I understand that your experiences there hurt like hell. I understand that for a while, hearing garbage like ‘you’ll never be enough’, being mocked for not breaking the ceiling over and over again, a NOBODY like Todd Williams trying to bury you for no reason over something so trivial and stupid… dick sucking douchebag…, and that two faced hypocrite cunt Roxi Johnson slandering you to the point where you had a legitimate case for a lawsuit against her along with the higher ups there feeding commentary lies about you about how you had confidence issues even though you moved past them… yeah… I get that it’s all painful. But you are not any less of a person, any less of a wrestler and hell, any less of a mother, because of it. It just… I hate to say it… it was never meant to be there…”

“No Adrianna, it wasn’t…” I said without hesitation.

“But who needs them? Their fault fo missing out! So what if you were never the Bombshells World Champion. When you win tonight, you’ll have accomplished something much more worthy: four title belts at once. So yeah, let the armchair quarterbacks be up Holden Ross’s ass… let the incels online jerk themselves off over how ‘great’ Sierra Silver is. You just let it roll off of your back, okay? This is one of those times where believing is what’s key. If anything… remember that one thing your mother wrote to you in that letter over 30 years ago… about fighting until the end?”

“Of course…” I said, having myself a brief moment of shock at the reminder that the 31st anniversary of my mother’s tragic passing from brain cancer passed less than a week prior. “I’m done allowing people to tell me that I don’t deserve something, or that I can’t do this, can’t do that. I’m approaching that garbage with a zero tolerance attitude from now on. I’m just so sick of people in this business thinking they can label and define me and that shit that happened at the end of my run at ‘that other place’ is the last time I let ANYONE try to define me again.”

I was feeling that fire in my heart at this point. For all of the horrible disappointments that I had gone through at the other place, I felt, going into this match tonight, that this WASN’T going to be like those times. I know that I had a minority of people believing in me tonight, but that was the furthest thing from my mind. As long as I believed, that was all that mattered. It’s a mantra that through thick and thin, I’ve stuck with for my entire career. I was going through some thoughts, creating a bit of an awkward silence for a moment

“Not today…” I thought to myself in reference to all the bullshit that I was dealing with before. “Not today… and never again…”

“Everything okay, sis?” Adrianna asked me, finally having a mellow moment after throwing so much shade toward my former employers throughout much of the conversation. I could only smile at the question, knowing that I was feeling perfectly fine.

“I’m defining MY legacy tonight, that’s what’s going to happen.”

I took a deep breath as we both stood up and we shared an embrace. Madness was about to come on the air and I had to walk out of the room to think about the promo I was going to do leading up to the match.

All those heartbreaks…

Experiencing that awful feeling of being knocked down, only to get up, only to get knocked down again.

Yet I knew before the bell rang that this was finally going to be the night I wasn’t going to get knocked down…

That FINALLY… I was going to change the narrative and break that fucking ceiling…

“Reputation” of my opponents on social media be damned!

And when I pinned Sierra to the mat for the three count?

That’s exactly what I did…

At last…

“I've been working my whole life
And now it's do or die
I am invincible, unbreakable
Unstoppable, unshakable
They knock me down, I get up again
I am the champion, you're gon' know my name
You can't hurt me now, I can't feel the pain
I was made for this, yeah, I was born to win
I am the champion”

Lyrics from “The Champion” by Carrie Underwood

After Madness aired…

Joy and fulfillment swept my heart as I held the then-IDL Championship. I knew that what I had done, not just winning the title, but becoming a four-belt champion altogether, was something that was truly special, something that I was never going to forget. I looked back at the three titles that I already had coming into tonight, then back at the one that I just won.

The happiness and the reality of it all was still sinking in for me and knowing that I FINALLY proved that I could be the face of any wrestling brand, even if the IDL title was considered a top brand title and not necessarily a world title at this point, was enough for me to look in the mirror, feel the greatest pride I felt in my career up to that point, and say the one truth that I knew I could express…

“I was ALWAYS enough…”

Suddenly? That old pain from before had become more irrelevant than ever…