Thunder Rosa had a great match with Harley Cameron on AEW Collision on 11/2 but the road back to the ring hasn’t been easy for her.
While speaking on the AEW Unrestricted podcast, Rosa talked about the injury that kept her sidelined from competing in AEW for many months:
“It was probably the worst year of my life, period, especially physically and mentally. Just imagine, like, you could run, you can jump, and they just cut your legs. You can’t do that. To have you learn how to walk, how to learn, how to run again, how to do a bunch of stuff again. I mean, I’m going to the extreme, but this is how it feels. It’s like, when they take something that you identify yourself with for so long, and they just take it away, and they’re like, No, you can’t have it. You gotta earn it again. So it was very rough, and it was very mentally rough.”
“I spoke about this very openly. I had suicidal thoughts for a long time, because, again, with all the layers that it had, not only like it was the injury, it was like, I feel certain people didn’t give me the chance, and some of the fans just turned on me. The comments that they were making, they were awful, like, ‘Go kill yourself. You don’t want to put people over.’ It hurt so bad that at times I couldn’t deal with it. I just couldn’t. I wanted to defend this title. I wanted to give my best, but I physically couldn’t do it. It just ate me, but I utilized the resources. I got physically stronger. I stopped having pain, which allowed me to exercise, to allow me to get back in the ring. So little by little, I started gaining my confidence back. The injury really broke my spirit and everything that came with the injury, but I fought through it.”
“I have a very strong team that was with me, my publicist, my manager, my son, even my former partner, too. They were there for me. A lot of my very, very close friends helped me tremendously. At the time, I had a really good therapist who helped me with a lot of the issues that I was dealing with. Alvaro and Alex Abrahantes, they were like my brothers. They really held my hand in the hardest moments of my career. They really held my hand in the hardest moments of my career. It made me want to cry when I was on commentary. There were times when I was doing commentary and I was having panic attacks because it was just so hard that I couldn’t be in the ring. It was hard. It was hard, but I endured and I was like, you know what? F**k it. I’m gonna come stronger and nothing is going to faze me anymore, and they helped me. Commentary helped me so much to really see professional wrestling in a different way, and also broadcasting. I’ve been broadcasting for three years with Busted Open Radio, and that really felt like it gave me strength and gave me a voice. Ever since then, I enjoy and I am blessed every time I step in the ring, because I never know when this is going to be taken away. It’s a blessing.”
If you use any portion of the quotes from this article please credit AEW Unrestricted with a h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription.
