“‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
- Some Dumbass Dude That Clearly Never Experienced Heartbreak
October 19th, 2012
It was a rainy Friday evening. I was cruising along I-280 North towards Detroit, Michigan for another pro wrestling event. I held onto the wheel with my fully functioning left hand, while my cerebral palsy laden right hand sat on my lap as Paramore’s “Pressure” blared out of my rinky dink Toyota speakers at max volume.
🎶 “Tell me where our time went
And if it was time well spent
Just don’t let me fall asleep
Feeling empty again…” 🎶
I thought about what moves I might do in my match that evening with Zach Gowen, my one legged tag team partner. I zoned out, thinking how rushed my Saturday was going to be.
The plan for the weekend was to wrestle in Detroit that night, immediately drive back to Cleveland and rest before Saturday evening’s Pro Wrestling Ohio TV tapings, wrestle during the recording of the first of three episodes, hop back in my car and immediately drive back to Detroit to main event another show with Gowen, before turning around to head back to my bed in Cleveland.
I watched as the windshield wipers removed the cascade of raindrops from my windshield and switched lanes.
Suddenly, my car began hydroplaning. I placed my bad hand on the wheel, hanging on with a grip that only the dead could match.
I was spinning out, headed directly for the wall:
🎶 “‘Cause I fear I might break
And I fear I can’t take it…” 🎶
I braced myself for impact, closing my eyes tightly.
I opened my eyes. I watched as smoke billowed out from under the hood of my vehicle. I sat stunned. The radio had stopped. I had gone from listening to the sweet voice of Hayley Williams to the sound of traffic zipping by me. Somehow my car had ended up resting face-forward in the left shoulder lane.
My car was totaled. I was a little shook up, my back a bit sore, but I was okay.
My friend and fellow wrestler Benjamin Boone just happened to live in the area where I had crashed, Toledo, and was booked on the PWO show the next day. I wasn’t going to make either of the two Detroit shows without a vehicle, but Ben would allow me to stay at his house, and I could at least get to the PWO show and back home.
That next day, I wrestled my match, coincidentally against Ben. Had I not crashed, I would have started my journey to Detroit, but I was car-less, so I headed out to the merch table for intermission.
That’s when I saw her.
She walked up to the merch table, long brown hair that touched the back shoulders of a striped sweater, bangs in the front of her face, blue jeans. She was so beautiful.
I was nervous talking to her, which I couldn’t remember feeling in forever.
“So,” I smiled with false confidence. “Who’s your favorite wrestler?” I was hoping for “Gregory Iron,” of course.
She smirked, hesitated and replied, “Bobby Beverly.”
Denied.
I took a photo with her, insisting that we pose for it prom style, and followed it up by asking her if she wanted a free autographed photo of me, shirtless. I tried to sound sarcastically charming, but probably sounded desperate.
My hands got clammy as I scrawled a barely legible rambling onto the pic, because I knew it would culminate with me writing my phone number on it.
I handed to her and said, “How do you like that, huh?”
She gave me a downward smirk and a nod and replied, “Yeaaa. Thankssss.”
She walked away. I didn’t expect any contact.
I’m not sure what exactly compelled her to do so — perhaps she didn’t get a scent of that desperation on me– but she texted me that night.
Soon after, we went on our first date. To Denny’s. Because I’m classy.
And she was so funny. Like, genuinely funny. I was so used to fake chuckling through relationships, but she had this great wit and timing. I’d set her up, and she’d knock me down, a perfect foil to my sophomoric humor.
I wrote her a sappy note — something I hadn’t done for a chick since grade school — and handed it to her while on a hike during our second date, designed to earn me my first kiss.
It worked, and the larva that had laid deep within my belly for so long blossomed into butterflies in an instant.
October 19th, 2016
I was trying to hurry home from another wrestling event, but I was hours away from being home with my girlfriend as I sat in a Sheetz parking lot at 11:59pm.
I hovered my thumb over “send,” impatiently waiting to text her at precisely midnight. The second that the minute switched, I sent her a YouTube link to Paramore’s “Still Into You.”
“I know it’s lame, but after all this time, I’m still into you. ❤“
“Classic! 😊 Happy Anniversary. I love you.”
May 14th, 2017
I braced myself for impact, closing my eyes tightly.
I opened my eyes. Somehow, I had ended up lying face down. I could move my neck, which was nothing short of a miracle. I had managed to survive taking a piledriver head first from the top rope, through a table.
I picked my head up off the canvas and watched blood pour from my forehead. The audience remained in stunned silence for a few moments as the sounds of Bad Rabbits’ “We Can Roll” faded out from the speakers. The silence in the room should have been replaced with boos — I was playing the part of villain that evening — but instead the crowd began chanting my name. “GREG! GREG! GREG!” echoed through The Columbus Club of Hamilton, Ontario.
Most of it had dried out on my face like a store-bought purifying peel, but a seemingly endless supply of blood just continued pouring out of the large gash in my hairline over top of the old stuff.
My face was totaled, my back a bit sore, but I was okay.
Physically, at least.
Mentally, I had been destroyed.
Just days earlier, my girlfriend had sat me down at home to tell me that while she loved me, she wasn’t sure as to whether she was in love with me.
My Dog Collar Match in Canada with Rickey Shane Page may have been the best performance in my entire career, and yet I couldn’t help but feel this intense sadness.
For a moment, I felt a strange euphoria as I watched the syrupy red substance fall into a puddle. It was a reminder that while my heart was broken, it was still pumping blood through my body. However, I questioned how long one could function on heart shrapnel alone.
As I swam in my own plasma, I drowned out the crowd noise in my brain with Paramore’s song “Pool,” released just two days prior:
🎶 “As if the first blood didn’t thrill enough
I went further out to see what else was left of us
Never found the deep end of our little ocean
Drain the fantasy of you headfirst into shallow pools…” 🎶
I knew I’d survive the aftermath of the match. A forehead can be stitched up, but does one repair a mutilated heart?
A part of me didn’t want it to stop. That part of me, feeling this sense of worthlessness — rejected and unloved — wanted to bleed out completely.
I was not the man I once was.
June 19th, 2017
After nearly five years together, my girlfriend and I officially broke up and I decided to move out, leaving her and our two cats behind. It was one of the hardest things I ever had to do.
She never really saw me cry. For the first time that night, my girlfriend and I cried a lot together. We both questioned ourselves, if we were doing the right thing.
“It’s not you,” she said. “It’s me. I’ve changed.”
What a line.
I knew she was being sincere, but a part of me felt like my now ex-girlfriend was one generic sentence away from saying, “Ya know, I’d love to spend the rest of my life with you, truly, but I’ve got to wash my hair tonight until infinity.” How can one just — fall out of love?
As I loaded the final boxes into my car, so many thoughts raced through my mind. We never, ever argued. I wondered where it all went wrong.
Where did it start to go wrong? How could I have fixed things? Why couldn’t she tell me how she was feeling? How could my best friend just not see me every day, and just stop talking to me altogether? Could she have feelings for another person? What’s so wrong with me?
My girlfriend had battled issues of her own for as long as I had known her. She wasn’t as outgoing as me, but that was okay. She didn’t really want to go out and do things with my friends, and I never forced her because, well, I wouldn’t want her to feel worse. She said that “this is just how I am.” I loved her, and if staying at home made her happy, then I wanted her to do what made her happy.
She was always very shy and quiet in public, but with me she was so hilarious and talkative and just so freaking gorgeous. How could she possibly be depressed?
“Just be happy,” I’d say.
“It’s not that easy, Gregory,” she’d reply.
She was right. It’s not that easy to just be happy. I was about to find that out the hard way.
I generally keep busy, and after the break-up I was trying to stay busier than usual. If I wasn’t working my 8 to 4 gig, I was weight lifting, and if I wasn’t doing weight lifting on my own, I was doing strength and conditioning training with my buddy Vince at Fit Legit Training, and if I wasn’t doing a strength class I was traveling for pro wrestling, and if I wasn’t traveling for pro wrestling I was doing the act of pro wrestling, and if I wasn’t doing the act of pro wrestling I was doing literally anything that helped me avoid the process of actually thinking.
But eventually, I’d have to go to sleep, and that’s when everything would come crashing down onto me. I’d get buried in my thoughts.
I had always considered myself a logical and sane guy — let’s ignore the fact that I willingly fall onto my back, neck and spinal cord repeatedly for money — so I figured with rational thinking I could convince my ex that surely, she loved me.
Super rational, Greg.
I called her one night, a few weeks after we separated, and I just rambled, trying to get answers, or some sort of closure.
She was very honest with me. She wanted time alone, to figure herself out and what makes her happy.
She said that if she were to be with someone, she would want to be with someone with a regular schedule. Someone that comes home right after work to have dinner with her instead of going directly to the gym. Someone that isn’t gone most weekends. Someone who wanted to buy a house with her, to have kids with her.
I did love coming home to her, even if my schedule wasn’t the most normal. In fact, my time living with her was the only time in my life I could remember looking forward to coming home. There were times when I would drive out of the way between shows, just to crawl into bed next to her for a couple of hours before hitting the road again.
I was gone most weekends, but in my head, I was traveling and working to hopefully get signed to a wrestling contract. That way, I could build a foundation so that years from now, my weekends would be free.
I did want a house and a family. I shared those same dreams with her, I just had a very different path than most that I was taking to get there. Admittedly, before her owning a house never seemed like something that was in the cards for me, but I wanted to share that experience with her.
I was terrible at saving money. There’s no excuse — I could have tried harder — but I also didn’t know there was this invisible time table set on the things we were planning on doing in life.
I wanted answers, and yet everything my ex said, as brutally honest as it was, just made me question everything about myself. Calling her that night made things worse. I began to lose my mind.
I started to put money away, to show her I could contribute to a house with her, just in case we got back together.
I began forcing myself to sleep on the couch in my living room. It was uncomfortable, it hurt my back and legs, but it made me get up to workout at 5am. If I lifted before work, it would free up two hours after work that I could spend with my ex if we got back together.
I loved her and was always loyal to her, but maybe my pro wrestling gig wasn’t stable enough to provide for a wife or kids. Shows would get canceled, and I’d be out a guaranteed couple of hundred dollars. And if I got hurt, how else would I get money in?
I contemplated quitting wrestling, if only it would win her back.
I was going through the motions, waking up and dressing my face up in a wide smile every morning.
I’d look in the mirror and not recognize my reflection. I saw a stranger staring back at me. Here I was posing as a hero, creating an escape for fans on the weekend. Meanwhile, I was trapped inside my own head, unable to save myself or the relationship that mattered most to me.
I cursed myself for being straight-edge, for wanting to abstain from the use of drugs and alcohol. Everyone else gets to numb their pain with a chemical dependency, and yet I felt I had to awake every day and face the harshness of reality, unfiltered.
My mood would constantly go up and down. I tried to be optimistic, but I would get stuck in my brain, wondering if I could ever love someone again the way that I loved my ex-girlfriend. I wondered if I was worthy enough of love.
My work was suffering. My wrestling was suffering. I was suffering.
I didn’t want to suffer any longer.
Present Day, 2018
On May 30th, Hayley Williams wrote an article for PaperMag.com, and if you read it, my not-so-subliminal connection with Paramore over the last year– particularly with the 2017 album “After Laughter,” — makes perfect sense.
At first listen, “After Laughter” sounds very upbeat and poppy. But if you really listen — and I did — there isn’t anything cheerful about the lyrics, “If I smile with my teeth/Bet you believe me/If I smile with my teeth/I think I believe me.”
“A lot happened within a short time,” Hayley wrote. “…I didn’t eat, I didn’t sleep, I didn’t laugh… for a long time. I’m still hesitant to call it depression.
Psychology is interesting. Depression is torment.”
Hayley was writing that album during a time in her life when she was coming to the realization that she shouldn’t have married her now ex-husband, that you can’t extract love from another.
My girlfriend had at some point fallen out of love with me, for reasons I’ll never be able to comprehend. She stayed with me for fear of hurting me. She sacrificed her mental health for my own. A big part of me will forever love Mary for that but trying to force her to fall back in love with me just wasn’t fair to either of us. You can’t just extract love from another.
After my post-break-up convo with my ex, I wasn’t doing things for myself. Everything I was doing — including the irrational things that I tried rationalizing to any friend that would listen — I was doing them with hopes that it would win my girlfriend back over. It was incredibly unhealthy.
I couldn’t come to terms with the idea that I was depressed.
If it wasn’t for all the close friends I’m so fortunate to have, I may have gone completely insane this past year. Being able to open to them and have them take time out of their lives for me helped in ways that I’ll never truly be able to repay them for. At times, I’m sure I was overbearing to talk to about this stuff, but they never gave up on me.
They helped me realize that I was good enough to be loved, that I could be a good husband and a father one day if I wanted. But first, I had to love myself.
I spent a lot of time learning how to forgive, to love myself again, to get unstuck. Getting unstuck involves loosening up that internal emotional attachment in your head. Changing your perspective and allowing the world to open and shift around you. We don’t let go of the past. We get past the past.
Getting unstuck means facing the truth, as challenging as it may be. I may be lonely or sad or upset today, but if I keep taking tiny steps towards change, I know that someday, I may feel better.
I’m not a religious guy, but I pray daily that the girl that I loved is becoming unstuck, too.
We all need to find the best way to deal. Writing this was a huge challenge, but for me, reading this aloud and seeing what’s been embedded in my skull now spread out onto these pages and into the world is therapeutic. It’s just as therapeutic as discussing my emotions with my friends, or throwing on my headphones and lifting weights, or structuring a wrestling match so that I can use my body to convey a beautiful story to you.
With this, I’m using the brain that I was given to convey a story to you, a story of hope. Most of my success in pro wrestling stems not from my in-ring ability, but from my ability to be open and honest with you all.
Mental health is a serious issue, and many of you are like family to me. I don’t want to suffer any longer, and I certainly don’t want members of my family to suffer. At some point you must realize that your mind matters.
I’m tired of being ashamed. I wouldn’t be ashamed if I had cancer, and I refuse to be ashamed of having these feelings in my brain.
With the right treatment, I can beat this.
The most challenging thing you’ll ever have to do when it comes to accomplishing anything in life is to take the first step towards your goal. It doesn’t get easier after that, but I promise you, it will never get harder than the first step.
🎶 “I’m just a little bit caught in the middle
I try to keep going but it’s not that simple
I think I’m a little bit caught in the middle
I gotta keep going or they’ll call me a quitter
Yeah, I’m caught in the middle” 🎶
Don’t stay stuck. If you need help, I hope that you can be brave, reach out and ask for it.
I’m not the man I once was.
I’m better.
Thanks for the inspiration, Hayley.
For more on Gregory Iron, including booking info for professional wrestling events, speaking engagements and workshops, find him on social media at www.Facebook.com/TheHandicappedHero, Twitter @GregoryIron, and Instagram @Gregory_Iron
www.Gregory-Iron.com relaunching soon.
