Taylor Wilde says her pro wrestling career is on hiatus now, and she isn’t sure if or when she will return to the ring.
Wilde hosted a new episode of her Wilde On podcast and shared the reason she left TNA last year with her guest, AEW star Brian Cage. Earlier in the show, Wilde had explained what brought her back to pro wrestling and the details about her leaving three months into her return.
Wilde returned to TNA in April 2021 after a ten-year hiatus, but ended up leaving in November of that year. She noted how a messy divorce, custody battle and COVID-19 complicated things, but she was able to return in October 2022. Wilde was in the middle of a storyline with KiLynn King as The Coven before leaving again in July 2023.
Wilde told Cage how several issues in her personal life compounded and how it affected her own physical and mental health, and work life.
“It effected my work life”
“Well actually — so wrestling is put on the shelf for me again. I went through a ton of shit. I haven’t even publicly spoken about this, so you’re pressing the right buttons here. Like I said, I touched on some of the personal stuff, like the custody battle, the divorce, and my dad had a heart attack shortly there after,” Wilde revealed.
“The first responders did CPR on him for almost an hour. He made it, but it was eight months in the hospital, he was in the ICU. He almost died a couple of times, he got COVID, he had to have a tracheotomy, and a partridge in a pear tree. But he’s home, he’s independently living, so that was beautiful,” she proclaimed. “The custody battle, divorce, got nastier in that time. It effected my work life, both my wrestling and as a firefighter.”
Wilde says she also moved in with her sister and late brother-in-law, who passed away after a freak accident. Wilde says she was thinking about taking a break to work on her mental health, then considered quitting her job as a firefighter and focus on wrestling full-time.
“Wrestling is on the shelf for me”
“But what people don’t know is that when I came back to wrestling, I was bringing my son on the road with me full-time. And that’s two 12-hour TV days with TNA, and then I was doing my podcast, I was working full-time as a firefighter still, and I think when I walked away from everything and I was going to focus on wrestling, my body pooped out on me,” she shared.
“I had a neurological emergency that scared me enough that I thought, ‘You know what? If this is any coorrelation to wrestling, then that’s it for me.’ So I was going to give wrestling my all this past year, and after everything I had been through whether it’s stress, whether it was the COVID vaccine, whether it was going to happen to me anyways,” Taylor Wilde said. “My body gave out on me, and so wrestling is on the shelf for me now.”
Brian Cage asked Wilde if her hiatus is permanent. Wilde said that what happened to her forever changed her. Although she is cleared, she’s focused on family life right now and feels like her perspective changed.
Taylor Wilde says she would have loved to stayed with TNA in some capacity. She noted how she would entertain being a manager and wrote all of The Coven’s content.
“The Coven was my baby. People don’t know this, but I wrote that shit. Like being a witch on screen was everything I dreamed of in the ‘90s. Like The Craft and grunge music, all that shit, that’s really who I was, am. Or producing backstage, participating creatively, commentary. I would have loved to have stayed, but I guess just the way that company goes and right time, right place. It didn’t end up staying that way. So I am living in the world that I always am, where it’s like, ‘I don’t know…’ I retired at 25, I came back ten years later. I don’t know [if I will come back].”
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