WWE: My Escape Route

There are hardships in life that no one is immune to. No matter how incomparable people are, they can all relate in the fact that they have endured the same tragedy: loss. Everyone goes through it, and everyone has a unique way of handling the situation. Some like to be left alone. Others like to reminisce in the good times. While I naturally do a little of both, I have a different way of handling my trials and tribulations. I clutch to what I have and absorb myself in it. I clutch to professional wrestling.

My first experience with dealing with loss was in the fifth grade. My grandfather, once a jovial, upbeat, overall happy man, was falling ill. For almost a year, he lived with my family. I didn’t realize it initially, but it suddenly became clear to me that we were going to care for him in his final days. Those final days came, and on November 22, 2005, the last one arrived. At 89, my Grandpa Potter died and I was left with a hole in my life. My buddy, my friend, the funniest guy I knew, he wasn’t there anymore.

In the days that followed, I can honestly say I had no time for the WWE. I recently looked up results to shows following that fateful day, and cannot remember a thing. Out of any death in my life to date, this one hit me with a near knockout blow. I attended the funeral, wrote him a note, and did anything in my being to cure my sadness. After days of reminiscing with my family about what a great man my grandfather was, I was burnt out. I was sick of crying, sick of yearning for that hole in my life to be filled. And then I realized that I had an escape route. I found out that I could leave the world that had had been flooded with sadness and enter one tha

manual”>ipad manualt always made me happy. December 2^nd came around, and Smackdown! was that escape route.

With the wake, funeral, and many other things involved with a death going on, I had been thrown out of the norm. I missed days of school, I slept in until the early hours of the afternoon, and a lot of my words were spoken about the past. Watching the WWE took my mind off of the world that was seemingly in a spin cycle of sorrow, and it got me back into the swing of things. The cocky young Randy Orton was still trying to get rid of the Undertaker, but the Phenom continued to play mind games with the Legend Killer. When The Deadman challenged Orton to a Hell in a Cell match, my mind was briefly taken away from the real world; I was in the world of the WWE, the world that never failed to captivate me, to completely flood my mind. For those two hours, it was nice.

RAW rolled around, and I eagerly flipped on my TV. Things had gone better since Friday, but the lingering sadness was still there, throughout my house. Two more hours of freedom, I thought. Nothing was sweeter than to see my least favorite man on the roster, the corrupt General Manager of RAW, be tried and fired (complete with being set into the back of a trash truck by Vincent K. McMahon himself) all in one night. My attitude before bed was one of jubilation. Eric Bischoff was gone!

Piece by piece, day by day, match by match, my life went back to normal. Before I knew it, I could find happiness. The days of going to school and passionately discussing the events of the previous night’s main event with my buddies had returned. I am no way discrediting my family in helping life return to normal; they were great, and we couldn’t have gotten through it without each other. Without the WWE though, I believe that my personal road out of mourning would have been much longer and rockier. It was my outlet, it was my escape route. It was the friend that made me happy and took my mind off of things when I needed it most.

So basically, thank you, WWE. Thanks for not stopping when my world did. Thanks for being there for me.