Threaded Mode | Linear Mode

ElijahMartin · (12-22-2021)

Entry 2
20 December 2021

I had so many things to get off my mind for my first entry that I basically said “fuck you” to all the usual pleasantries and went right into the heart of the matter. So this time, let’s see if we can get off on the right foot together. My name is Elijah Martin - lifelong resident of The Bronx, a graduate from the unofficial Ball So Hard University and I suffer from anxiety-based depression that causes low self esteem and periods of isolation from people I care about.

Anyone who has been around me for any reasonable length of time knows the basics about my life story - dad left not too long after my little sister was born, mom had her demons and let all the wrong men into her life, I got raised by the streets more than anything or anyone else during my childhood… that’s the basic information I willingly put out there when the opportunity presents itself. When you play with the cards I got dealt throughout my childhood, people typically end up with their lives going one of four ways: dying from violence, dying from drugs, dying from disease or dying behind bars. The Bronx is the perfect example of American lower class neighborhoods where more likely than not, any child who lives there is going to become a statistic instead of a high school graduate. And yeah, there’s always gonna be those tough guys who fight their way to survival, or those dudes with special talents who qualify for the very short “Do Not Touch” list because we want them to give the neighborhood a better reputation than it currently has… I was neither of those things, I just got lucky.

When my father decided to leave and never come back, I was about to turn five and my sister was only a couple months old. There isn’t much I remember about him, and honestly I don’t care to anyways. My sister and I would never get so much as a letter or a birthday card or even a phone call to see how we were doing as we continued to get through our childhood. I have been asked a couple of times over the years if I had any desire to find my father and reunite with him. The simple answer - hell no.

My mother is a very loaded, complicated issue to dissect. I can’t believe what I’m about to say is the truth, but aside from the man she recently married back in October, my father was the longest and “most stable” relationship she ever had… which shows you the caliber of men she had in and out of the house for the last ten years I lived under the same roof as her. The never ending carousel of men coming in and out of her life and the lives of her offspring always had some kind of big red flag that caused them to never last long in our household: drugs, alcohol, gambling, womanizer, gang activities… it was just one big clusterfuck after another, a revolving door of complete fucking nonsense. And for the most part, whatever vice was the big red flag for the “man of the hour,” it sucked my mother right into the same vice while the relationship existed.

Unfortunately, my sister and I took different paths in life - while I looked to get out of there the moment an opportunity showed itself, she decided to stay behind and help our mother get out of the muck. My sister was the saver, the heart of the family… she was the one who did as much as she could to make the family stay together, even as a kid. We stay in contact from time to time and I love her dearly for getting our mother out of the neighborhood to clean up her act, but I wouldn’t necessarily say we have a close relationship. I tell her just enough about what I’m doing so her and mother feel like they know what’s going on and I only ask questions I want to know the answers to regarding them both. Neither of them were fans of me leaving home to pursue my career in professional wrestling, but they have warmed up to the idea over the years and now have grown to at least tolerate what I do, even if they don’t watch much of the stuff I’ve done on television or pay-per-view over the years.

“Friends” was a word, an idea, a concept that I just never allowed into my brain until I got established in the business and felt it was safe to actually allow a small circle of people get to know what I’m all about. I made acquaintances, I had connections, I established business partners… but for about the first twenty-five years of my life, I always kept a VERY long arm’s length between my personal life and anyone I came into contact with outside the door of my house. I didn’t care if I dealt with you five days a week at school, several nights a week on the streets or over the weekends training at my mentor’s wrestling school warehouse - I kept to myself and remained a severe introvert for a long time. And even still now at the age of thirty-four, I find myself more reserved than usual when I’m around people I’m not familiar with. Maybe it comes with being around death so much growing up that I just taught myself not to get too attached to anymore, maybe I just didn’t like people, maybe I got so full of myself at times that I grew to think my shit didn’t stink… I don’t have any solution that covers the entirety of my life.

The date is September Twenty-Eight of 2019, a rare Saturday off from the road, sitting at home in The Bronx. I had been taking less and less dates over the past eight to ten months, locking myself in my house and refusing to leave more and more, having a few moments of mental weakness where I really just thought about ending it all. I viewed my wrestling career to that point as a failure, I kept to myself so much that I didn’t have anyone to turn to with my problems that I trusted to keep everything private, I was continuously getting less motivated to get out of bed everyday… it felt like the walls were closing in each day, inch by precious inch, just suffocating and taking the breath out of me an ounce at a time. But when I woke up on that morning, something was just different: the nail beds on my fingers were purple, I had a bit of a headache and my heart was racing. I didn’t think too much of it, but I mentioned what was going on to this chick I had been fucking around with recently and she suggested going to Urgent Care to be safe. That’s where the good part of my day ended.

I walked to the Urgent Care down the block from me, checked in and then had my vitals taken when I was brought back to my exam room. I knew something wasn’t right when the nurse walked out of my exam room because her face just looked petrified. The next thing I know, the doctor on duty for the day walked in and checked my blood pressure again… it was even higher than the first time, and I only know that because I was checking with my peripheral vision. He then said an ambulance was going to be there any minute to take me immediately to the Emergency Room, because I was having clear signs of an infection of some sort.

The next thing I know, I’m on a gurney with an IV drip connected to me and I’m rushed to a private room in the ER area of the hospital for a blood draw. Over the next four days I spent with the Intensive Care unit, a few other tests were done and I slept a lot, ultimately being told that some mysterious infection that doctors couldn’t discover the source of had caused me to nearly start going septic. I was told that if I had come to the hospital as little as a few hours later, I could have had permanent and even possibly life ending complications. But thankfully, the infection had been treated properly and I was released after a six-day visit. Since then, my primary care doctor has suspected it’s possible the cellulitis I had in my right leg a couple of years earlier never completely healed and lied dormant until that random day.

When I was staying in the hospital, it was the closest I had ever come to dying and it made me recognize two things: I have depression and I need to step away from the wrestling business indefinitely if I want any fair chance of getting my mental health treated properly. During the final two days that I was in the hospital, I got moved from ICU to a regular room and requested mental health evaluations from two separate therapists, just to be sure my own self evaluation was correct. As I thought, both counselors agreed with my assessment and suggested enrolling myself into an Intensive Outpatient Program with a mental health treatment center about forty minutes from my house. I would undergo a more thorough evaluation for my admission interview at the treatment center and within three days of my release from the hospital, I had respectfully backed out of the small handful of wrestling bookings I had for the remainder of the year and was enrolled into a six-week mental health program.

There were three categories into which concerns were addressed with patients: moods, thoughts and behaviors. My moods were depression and anxiety, my thoughts were labeled worry and low self esteem, my behaviors were brooding and isolating. I went to this program four hours a day, three days a week. My schedule would include Art Therapy twice a week, which despite never being very good with anything remotely artistic except wrestling and singing, I actually felt somewhat accomplished with what I was able to produce from those classes. I would also have a weekly class to address self acceptance and compassion, regulating your emotions, grief and loss, healthy communication skills, tolerating distress, anxiety skills, psychotherapy, and mindfulness skills. All of these group classes allowed me to feel comfortable in my own skin again and willing to tell stories about my past that I had buried long ago, as well as become a leader within that environment and even befriend a few of my fellow patients. Between the hospital stay and my Intensive Outpatient mental health program, I believe to this day that the events of those eight weeks saved my life physically and mentally. I am forever grateful for the medical professionals at both facilities and will never forget those experiences for the rest of my life.

The last seven hundred and fifty-two days since I last walked out of my Intensive Outpatient Therapy have been a slow grind for me: I have tried to grow as much as possible each day, working on both my mental and physical strength. Just like any other person, I have my good days and I have my bad days. There are a lot of days where I feel like I can go out and beat the ass of the toughest guy on the block, but every once in a while… that depression rears its ugly head and all I wanna do is lay in bed all day. Regular sessions with a therapist and light medication help remedy my depression for the most part, but nobody is perfect and I have grown to accept the occasional “bad days” that come with the lot I’ve been dealt in life.

When I began to embark on this journey, I entered with zero expectations of what would come out on the other side and whether or not I would like the person I became in the process. I told myself that I was going to stay out of professional wrestling as long as I needed to in order to fix all facets of my health, and I stayed true to my word. I finally brought up the idea of getting back into wrestling shape just after Halloween 2020 and my therapist believed that I was in a good enough place with my mental health that she gave me her blessing to give it a shot. From there, it was a matter of getting a proper physical from my primary doctor to get his clearance, and now I was off and running.

My mentor offered to help me get back in ring shape, get my cardio back to a sufficient level and shake off the rust from being away as long as I was. He spent the first week focusing on cardio and basic workouts, never setting foot inside a wrestling ring. He wanted to make sure I had a solid foundation back underneath me before we took any risks of potential injury between the ropes. My goal was to give myself a Christmas present and have my confidence back before we reached the New Year. On the twenty-third of December, my mentor and I wrestled a “no contest” that went seventy-five minutes long… I was ready and I met my goal by two days.

This is the time of the year where everyone is looking to the past and the future at the same time - people take stock in what had been accomplished in the prior twelve months, and then start making all kinds of “resolutions” or goals for what they want to accomplish in the twelve months to come. But in this business, you learn very quick that you need to have a memory shorter than a goldfish and just focus on what lies ahead in the immediate future. And yes, I have reached a preliminary agreement to have a rematch for the XWF Anarchy Championship after the ridiculous ending to my original title shot at Bad Medicine, but I’ve got more pressing issues to settle first.

During my red-hot month of October, I had a victory over Charlie Nickels in one of the craziest matches of my young XWF career at Radio City Music Hall, where the referee was forced to be blindfolded during the contest. It was a challenge, but I was experiencing what poker players would call a “sun run” and just couldn’t lose at the time. But things have changed since then, as I’ve faced some higher quality challengers and come across some wild detours along the way of trying to become a champion in the XWF. I lost two championship matches in the month of November - the first loss I take full responsibility for losing, the latter was nothing but bullshit. So now, it’s time for me to prove my worth all over again.

Charlie, you’ve been on quite the run to be the current, reigning, defending World Television Champion… but a victory this Saturday night would be the perfect retribution, the ideal way to bring an end to the beginning of my XWF career. It is my goal to cause an untimely divorce to the short marriage between you and Goldie, and it would be my pleasure to make that happen. It’s gonna be a snow covered White Christmas in the North Pole, where we are going to be taking a Sleigh Ride to the ring and Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree. And while you keep telling Goldie that All I Want for Christmas is You, it’s going to be a grim reality for you in that Winter Wonderland when you find out that I am the one who be having A Holly, Jolly Christmas.

Oh, you can send all the letters you want to Santa Baby, but Charlie… I’m not going to allow you to Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas. This is not going to be a fairy tale with a happy ending, like Frosty the Snowman or Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer… I am ready to unleash my own version of Jingle Bell Rock and Let It Snow all kinds of hell while I’m decking your halls. And Nickels, I’ve gotta ask… Do You Hear What I Hear? No? Well it’s okay, because at the end of The Most Wonderful Time of the Year, the timekeeper will ring those Jingle Bells as we will Hark as The Herald Angels Sing and the referee raises my hand in victory… delivering you a Blue Christmas and giving me the perfect Christmas Vacation, when I walk away the NEW WORLD TELEVISION CHAMPION!

Threaded Mode \| Linear Mode A Very Savage Xmas, Indeed
Author	Message