NOT REALLY A SPOILER ALERT: This article covers my life and thoughts lately.
Hi, everyone! Sorry, I’ve been incredibly MIA ever since the #GretasJunkyardTurns3 event, which I haven’t even posted about on the blog yet. I’m still in the process of getting the video files from my sister, so I can edit them and put together a quick highlight reel.
This isn’t really one of my usual articles, and if this was college Gretchen, these thoughts would have gone straight to my Tumblr, which basically covered all things dark, weird, and emo. But I really wanted to talk about this here, because it’s a dump of all my favorite things after all, and this was more than just a favorite thing for me. This was my life; my childhood. WWE (or WWF back then) played such a huge role in my life, and I’ve never really outgrown it (even though I thought I did in college).Like I said—wrestling was a big part of my life. I don’t exactly remember how I started watching it, but I’m pretty sure it was the influence of my grandmother (who was a huge fan of Hulk Hogan) and my uncle. I was maybe 5 or 6 years old when I started? I can’t really recall—but I was very fond of the Ultimate Warrior, Razon Ramon, and the Undertaker. My first legit favorite wrestler was Stone Cold Steve Austin, and there were many strange moments where I daydreamed that he was my dad and 9-year-old-me was struggling to become a superstar like him someday.
The peak of my obsession was in high school, when I first shipped Matt Hardy and Lita (I was crazy over the Hardy Boys), and then Randy Orton and Stacy Keibler. I was the kind of obsessed fangirl who collected all magazines, calendars, shirts, bed sheets, and any merchandise I could find. It drove my mom insane. Here was her first daughter who was addicted to something that was anything but ladylike. I watched every single live show they had here—the first time, I even made a gigantic sign for John Cena (I promise you, it was the biggest sign in the arena made with four cartolinas) and it said, “Will you marry me, Cena?” After his match, when he stood on the turnbuckle that faced my side of the Araneta Coliseum, he pointed at my sign and waved. To this day, I could probably count that as one of the top 10 best moments of my life.
You guys have probably read it a few times here, but I used to isolate myself a lot from the real world, and it was genuinely okay with me because I had my music, my writing, and my fanfics. If I wasn’t secretly gushing over a Draco-Hermione or a Randy-Stacy fanfic on FF.net, I was writing them. It was here that I made some of the coolest friends (the closest I have to pen pals), because we all belonged to the same fandoms who understood and respected each other’s obsessions. It was a great world to be a part of.
My love for WWE started to fade around the same time I got into my first relationship (I was 21) because then, I became more preoccupied with dinner dates, food trips, and movies. I was still a little updated with the wrestlers I liked but slowly, new wrestlers came in, storylines changed, and eventually I was out of the loop. But WWE never really left who I was, because whenever I saw something related to it, my eyes still lit up and I would remember my glory days of cocooning myself inside my room to watch matches, read fanfics, and daydream about becoming a superstar.
I don’t even know why I felt the need to write this. Maybe because after watching WWE Manila 2016, even though I only knew John Cena, Big Show, Chris Jericho, Sheamus, Roman Reigns, and Seth Rollins, and I was incredibly clueless with the storylines, the spark that faded was faintly ignited. I was excited to see Charlotte Flair and Sasha Banks as well—though the only thing I knew about Charlotte was that she was the daughter of Ric Flair. I had no idea who they were—all I knew based on what I was seeing on the Internet was that they were changing the game and elevating the women’s division. This struck me, because I always admired Lita and Trish Stratus, and I genuinely missed seeing that kind of action with the women on the ring.
And so from that point after watching WWE Manila 2016 to the Greta’s Junkyard Turns 3 event, I found myself stumbling upon random matches on social media from Raw and Smackdown replays, discovering what a gorgeous man Seth Rollins was, following him on Twitter, and seeing his Tweets to Sasha Banks—and from there, I just searched for more stuff and came across this Facebook Live video of R-Truth where Seth Rollins and Sasha Banks were talking about them being shipped, which eventually led to Seth Tweeting that their ship name was “Sesha.”
I’m going to go off-topic a little but a few days ago, I posted something on Instagram and briefly mentioned that I was becoming so obsessed with the “Sesha Ballins” ship and this girl, who lives all the way in Bicol, commented and said she used to read my wrestling fanfiction back in the day. I don’t know how she knew it was me or how she found me again after all these years, especially because I was never, ever vocal about my FF.net username and even created two separate accounts—one for WWE stuff, and one for Harry Potter stuff. But she found me, and she mentioned two stories that she loved, and she told me that her and her friends used to run to the computer shop after school just to check if I had updated my story with new chapters. It was mind-blowing, and it felt amazing. And one of the things she said that struck me was how it was nice that I was still a fan after all these years, because most people she knew outgrew it. Her friends included. I guess some things never change, and it takes just the right ship and the right superstars to hook you back in.
Anyway, I know it’s weird to be rambling about this stuff, but the reason I wanted to write this was because after I got sucked back into the wonderful world of WWE, it put me in a strange phase. I can’t quite describe it, but it really reminded me a lot of who I was back then, my dreams as a little girl, the unclear path of what I wanted to do with my life after school—and in a way, it was a nice reality check. It slowly started to build a ball inside of me that keeps growing and filling up with more of my dreams, emotions, and all the things I want to do and still have to do. I want to write, and by writing, not blog writing but actual fiction writing. I want to be more aggressive in growing Greta’s Junkyard AND helping my mom expand Mama Jessie’s Kesong Puti, I want to offer my writing services on a freelance basis, I want to practice my being a makeup artist, I want to finish a novel—I want to do so many things! It might be a little comical, but all this energy and motivation came from that spark that was ignited by WWE. And I need to hold on to it and keep it burning.