I don't know why, but two months after I closed my e-federation for roughly a decade, Ground Zero Wrestling Association (GZWA), I feel compelled to tell why I decided to walk away from the game of e-fedding.
For those in the know, I'm not going to lie and blame this on others, this was my biggest mistake in a laundry list of mistakes of being a fed-head. And here I thought it wasn't going to get any worse than some of the stupid shit I did starting out or throughout my run of handling (or rather mishandling) ZXWWF. If you want the 411 on that story, it's in the archives of the Chronicles of a Fed-Head label on this blog. There's no need to retread familiar territory on this entry.
I'll go in-depth on my time of running GZWA during it's ups and downs at a MUCH later date, but for now, I'm just going to focus on the why's of why I decided to hang up the boots so to speak.
As many of you know, my decision to leave came after my costly mistake to allow James Ceno into my e-federation.
I had worked with him in the past on a collaboration storyline, grooming the newcomer Ariel Summer to being a wrestler studying and training under our characters at the time. Ariel Summer flaked out on us, despite all of the work we put into writing character development pieces and helping the handler out with content to use for their roleplays, only to reveal themselvs as resident troublemaker that I'm sure everyone has heard of in their e-fed travels one way or another - Travis Blake/Taryn Willow/Natasha Rose. The guy handles so many characters that I'm sure you know who he is since he gets around. Long story short, the guy had stabbed me in the back in the past and I didn't want anything to do with him, especially after he catfished to get back into my comfort zone and earn my trust under false pretenses. So yeah, Ceno and I had bonded briefly over working together in that collaboration and our mutual disgust with having our free time wasted.
A short time after that, the e-fed that Ceno was part of, Carnage Wrestling, would blacklist him out of the company along with the community as a whole for forcing a sexual assault/rape storyline onto his peers. After the altercation with Travis, I honestly didn't have any interactions with him before this point. I just know that he flat out stopped talking to me after that point. To this day, I have never read the subject manner in question, nor have I heard the full scope of the incident. Carnage Wrestling was wise to wash their hands of the situation entirely and remove him out of the equation.
In retrospect, I should have done the same thing. Instead, he pops up out of the blue on Twitter under a different account around the start of May 2020. He's upfront with me (as per someone's humble suggestion who will remain unnamed) and tells me who he is and doesn't try to lie to earn my trust like Travis did. That resonated with me. "Maybe he's learned his lesson?" I thought. I didn't just allow him to join my fed in one fell swoop. No, I expressed to my members if it was going to be a problem then they had the floor to speak up about it without any repercussions. Only ONE person spoke up and they got blocked by James Ceno on Twitter as a result. That should have raised a red flag for me right there, but I let the snake into my e-fed home anyway.
At the time, I was running the first G1 Climax of its kind in a way for GZWA. I was having problems managing it from top to bottom. People kept dropping out of it since it was on a weekly schedule instead of our normal twice a month booking schedule. My former World champion had to drop out due to personal reasons and I was left with a gaping hole in terms of writers on that bracket/block. So of course I recklessly accepted Ceno into my e-fed to fill that gap since I knew he could write roleplays from collaborating with him in the past. I got caught up in this delusional idea in my head that GZWA will be home to his redemption story of sorts, both in-character and out-of-character for his previous misdeeds. That's EXACTLY where I fucked up royally.
I'm getting a little ahead of myself but I should rewind the clock back to October 2019. That was the month where my grandmother died. I hope I don't get any slack for using that image above, but the quote is exactly what reminded me of her. She was a very religious and spiritual person and instilled those teachings onto her eight children and her grandchildren. There's not a single day that I don't think about her old nay-sayings and home remedies. I still miss her very much, but at that stage of pancreatic cancer, I'm just glad she's not in pain anymore, especially right now during this global pandemic. It would've been too much for her right now.
I brought her up because the week of her demise, I had results to work on for GZWA that I ended up postponing until the 20th after the news of her demise. During that week and the one that followed with her funeral right around the corner, it was the first time I seriously thought about why the hell am I still putting up with this game? If it wasn't for the Divinity Unlimited side project/collaboration that I had started the year prior, I was sure at that point that I would have kicked this hobby/habit to the curb a year or two prior. It’s funny too because almost every single time I brought that I was considering leaving the game for good, people rarely took me seriously.
I made a lot of friends through Divinity and reunited with other handlers/writers/roleplayers that I thought were lost in the ether for years prior. In that regard, it was a breath of fresh air. I know that a "talent management agency" wasn't an original idea, but I took pride in the fact that I brought so many roleplayers/handlers together who didn't have the opportunity to work together and/or collaborate otherwise. I never had the intention of recruiting people for a single e-fed, even though I should have - even though I know that competitive/promo-based roleplaying that GZWA was run under wasn't everyone's cup of tea at this point of the game in 2020. You mention that nowadays online and it sounds like you said Lord Voldemort in a Harry Potter novel/film as if it's that taboo. I get it though. Angled feds and micro feds are much less stressful and more rewarding for those people who rather map their entire feuds out in one go instead of leaving their fates up to booking and/or judging for winners.
At the time, I was struggling to transition GZWA from being a traditional roleplay-based e-fed to being a hybrid between angled and roleplay-based. In retrospect, I felt that the move was a colossal failure. We were leaning more on the old scheme of things from show to show and I hold myself responsible for not enforcing the new rules more because I was genuinely scared of driving off the few reliable and consistent members I had at the time - at least the ones who committed to participating to regular deadlines and contributing to the results regularly.
As you can see, it's becoming a pattern. I have been failing to realize on multiple fronts that I have been failing to put out the best ideas and executing them as well as they should have been. I was doing nothing but frustrating myself more and more. Whether it was trying to decide what direction to take my own characters, such as pitching a World title feud with the newly crowned champion to put her over to setup a potential descent down into darkness for my mainstay character, Mariah, or trying to come up with a feud that was worth Seras Collins' time and effort after she agreed to coming into my e-fed to potentially continue what we started in Hybrid Wrestling the year prior. I honestly felt like I was wasting Seras' handler's time as I couldn't cook up not a single idea to get the ball rolling. This was already after I shat the bed on booking Aphrodite Noel's tenure in my e-fed for the first few months. In retrospect, I clearly didn't know what I was doing. I should have walked away from this game ages ago. In my stubbornness, I didn't want to quit. I didn't want to give up. If I gave up, then I would be a quitter and everything that I have done with this e-fed and my contributions to this game as a whole would have been all for nothing. I wouldn't be the fighter like my grandmother was in her final months. I thought if I just kept powering through all of these shortcomings and mishaps, that everything would be alright. I thought that if I could keep drowning myself into my work, all of this bad stuff would stop happening. That was childish for me to think that, especially once the global pandemic AKA COVID-19 consumed our entire way of life.
It was here when I got the crazy ass idea to run my own G1 Climax for GZWA. That would end up being one of the last nails in my coffin so to speak. Traditionally, I had GZWA booked for shows usually once or twice a month as my schedule would allow. It was pretty laid back and my members liked it for the most part. This tournament threw a monkey wrench into that as it required the competitors in the tournament on a weekly commitment. I ran it in alternating weeks with the two blocks on alternating weeks, thinking that would ease it up a bit on those who were committed to participating. It quickly devolved into a clusterfuck as people got confused on when the deadlines were, what week was their match, and so on, so there were a ton of no-shows and/or late submissions if any in terms of participation. I was losing my patience and growing frustrated by the weeks that went on since I was writing those shows every week primarily on my own.
Bless my staff members' hearts, but I wasn't dropping my workload in their laps. Angel and Sam offered to help me write shows, but I rather do it myself since I knew where people were going with most storylines and it tended to be more work for me to change stuff that didn't gel with the rest of what I had already written on my end. That isn't a knack against their talents, just more factors to contribute to my own growing Pygmalion Syndrome (Google it) at this stage of being a fed-head. I was cranking these shows out only to immediately start on the next without giving myself a break nor a breather. That only contributed even more to the unnecessary pressure I was putting on myself to make each set of results better than the last until I started lashing out at my members for no showing/lack of participation in the tournament that they signed up for. I brought this problem onto myself and it all came crashing down like a ton of bricks. My members' own personal dilemmas and problems caused a few to drop out of the tournament while others were unable to contribute at all for weeks at a time from issues stemming from lack of internet access, family matters like my own, etc. It became a clusterfuck to micro-manage, even though I tried, especially for the few people who were cranking out excellent roleplays for each "night" of the tournament blocks. Once again, I only have myself to blame for this. My own members warned me of this massive undertaking running a unique tournament like this would only burn me out and it did just that - all because I was too stubborn to ask for help and wanting to do everything myself. Bobbi Jackson's handler (GZWA's reigning World Champion at the time) implored me to take a break and I didn't, thinking that if I would only get to the point where I finally had time away from normal job (FYI my job never sent us home for COVID-19 and pegged us "essential" workers for coming into work, despite working for a college campus. I'll never understand that shit to this day, but obviously, it's a manner well above my pay grade to understand...) for a week or two that I could just sit back and detox a bit from this game and let my sanity breathe a bit. At that point, that's where I was like two more weeks and it's all gravy on this vacation, but that's where we come back to James Ceno.
Like I mentioned before, I pegged him as a quick band-aid to fill in for a departure to the tournament of one of our former champions dropping out of the tournament due to his own ongoing health issues. I was convinced that I could offer Ceno this spot in the tournament and it would be his shot at redemption. Call me an optimist, call me naive, or just call me stupid, but I can't help to look for the best in people, especially after all that's happened in 2020. What happened next was when things took a turn for the worst. On the morning of June 25th, I woke up at 5AM like I normally do for work and glanced at my laptop. I sleep with it next to me on one of those stands next to my bed for I don't have to worry about knocking it to the floor in my sleep. I open up Tweetdeck and I see that there's a ton of notifications on the GZWA account. I'm skimming around and got back to the source where the victim of Ceno's foul play was publicly expressing her disgust with the situation that he was in my e-fed. I want to clear the air about this right now - I have absolutely nothing against this victim. That's what she was a victim to his actions in the same vein of the ongoing #SpeakingOut allegations in professional wrestling right now. To this day, I still don't even know the full scope of the situation. Regardless of that fact, her vocal expression of her feelings and trauma that she experienced in light of that situation are justified a thousand-fold. Like I said though, I skimmed what she had to say and offered a quick reply and made my one hour commute to work like I normally do every morning. By the time I got to work and logged back in at my desk in my work office, the whole situation had spiraled out of control. One of my staff members, Sam, is always trying to go above and beyond to get with members and bring out their best with his in-character interviews. Naturally, he was doing the same for Ceno as he offered that platform in-character. I didn't know that Ceno was going to take light of that situation with the victim and glamorize it into a character development angle. That was as jarring to me as it came to anyone else. Sam didn't know the scope of what he did. It was my fault for not informing him in detail of Ceno's past. At that point, I knew Ceno's victim was absolutely right about me and my e-fed, I was a fucking enabler to Ceno's malignant behavior. There were no excuses and no exceptions to that fact. I take full responsibility for that costly mistake. No one in my e-fed is to blame for that but me.
It scared me too as I thought back to the incident where I was running a storyline where Mariah was slowly losing her sanity about a decade ago. She was cutting herself in promos (something I had history with in my mid-twenties at the height of my depression) as her sanity slipped away. I stopped that angle cold turkey when someone messaged me privately that it was too hard for them to read as part of the storyline as it was triggering their own PTSD or a similar situation where they were cutting themselves with suicidal tendencies. The handler feared having a relapse and of course I stopped that part of the angle. I bring that up now as it gave me a hollow realization. My actions were doing the same thing to the victim of Ceno's actions. As long as he was in my e-fed and I was enabling him with a platform, I was merely causing this woman more and more pain, no matter what good intentions I may have had. I was mortified when I came to this realization. I didn't fucking belong nor deserved to be in charge of my e-fed or any for that matter if my actions and decisions were hurting people. That was never my intent in this game. I'm sorry to that woman that it took me that long to realize this costly mistake until it was far too late.
I could have simply removed him from my e-fed and moved on, business as usual, but in my head, I had tainted the trust of my members and the community as a whole, especially when I started reading the comments all over Twitter. GZWA wasn't going to survive nor bounce back from that. I thought about it long and hard as I sat in a meeting at work that morning. It was fuck up after fuck up after fuck up after fuck up with no end in sight. The only solution I had was to load the bullet into the chamber and put the bitch (in this case, GZWA) to rest - for good like Ole Yeller. And that's exactly what I did.
I know people within GZWA weren't happy to hear that decision, but I was done - mentally and physically. I can't fuck up anymore if I'm not part of the game anymore. As much as I hated seeing the many talented people in my e-fed go without an e-fed home, I wasn't going to have them be dragged through the mud for my own stupidity and carelessness. I'm sure there's a certain sect of the community that gets their rocks off every time that they see that they've driven off someone from the world of e-fedding to quit from their gang mentality and poor attempts at “cancel culture” in this game. For the record, I quit on my own accord because I was mentally spent on this game. No one didn't "run me out of the game" - I did that on my own volition.
For those wondering, I'm not giving up on people and I'm not giving up on seeing the best in people either. My only regret from all of this is not listening to people sooner before everything came to a boil. Well, that and how many snakes I had surrounded myself with and how quickly those so-called "friends" disappear once shit hits the fan. In that regard, I only have myself to blame, really. I'm naturally an introvert and I'm not overly social to begin with but I completely withdrew into myself over the last few months before the end. After I pulled the plug on GZWA, I completely stepped away. I haven't looked at the GZWA and my other e-fedding accounts (save for Divinity and Mariah's for the few people who I keep in touch with) since this event transpired. I didn't want to talk about it. I just wanted to walk away from all of this and just see what my life would be like without e-fedding in it and if people would still give a damn about me as a person without me being a fed-head. I still don't have all of the answers to those questions, but it's a day by day endeavor.
There’s the people who completely distanced themselves away from me and those that completely went ghost the second I shut the e-fed down. That was to be expected to be quite honest. I haven’t been the best at dealing with that myself if I’m perfectly honest. There’s people to this day - roughly 4-5 months after the fact - that I’m still leery about speaking to out of fear or potential backlash. I’m not going to lie about that. I distanced myself from the game altogether when this decision blew up in my face. I left roughly every e-fed related Discord server I was a part of and pretty much took almost all of my e-fed related accounts off of my Tweetdeck layout. Hell, there were people who barely spoke to me as it was when I was a fed-head out of obligation, so I knew that they weren’t going to speak to me after the fact. Of course, there’s still the random thirsty DMs and follows that I would get out of the blue from other handlers (DTF accounts mostly) that would try to pitch hooking up with one of my characters and that never died down even after I left this game (laughs). Seriously though, I’m flattered that people still even care to even contact me in that regard. The thing that hurts the most though are the folks who completely cut all ties with me, despite knowing me as an individual and my character throughout my e-fed tenure. I get it though - I fucked up and they had to wipe the dog shit off of their shoes and discard it away from any association.
On a positive note, I’ve moved on. I started writing and illustrating my superhero narrative that I never had the time to invest on fully as long as I was investing 95% of my free time planning and writing for e-feds and I’m really excited about the results thus far. The few people who wanted to keep in touch with me have kept in touch across social media and really opened my eyes on how much they care about me outside of this game, especially when I took that fact for granted before all of this went down. From what I hear from others still in the e-fed game, most of my old GZWA roster members and collaborators outside of it are doing well for themselves too. Life moves on. E-fedding moves on - with or without me and that’s absolutely 1000% okay.
The whole experience was a learning lesson for me and an eye-opener in more ways than one. I’m sorry to those that were affected by my poor decision-making and those friendships and/or relationships that were ruined as a result of it. I only hope that things are in a better place now for all involved.
Shoutouts & Special Thanks:
Sam: It's not your fault. Don't kick yourself for this.
Arkia: Thanks for being there for me during all of this and supporting me throughout my ups and downs in my personal/private life. Definitely my e-fed mom. I call you "Momma Mia Kia" for a reason :P
Serena: I'm sorry that we never got to get your return going into full swing when you were completely motivated and excited to get the ball rolling again, only for me to shut the whole thing down. Despite that, thank you for putting up with all of those days and nights of me rambling and ranting about e-fedding and wrestling as a whole. You'll always be the lil sis I never had.
Dani/Brooklyn: Thanks for putting up with my crazy behind throughout all of this. Don’t worry we still have many more stories to write about Xion and Brooklyn’s family before it’s all said and done.
Amanda Cortez: Definitely one of my longest friends in this game (along with Mel/Angel, Raven, and Amber from Caws.ws and ZXWWF) and thank you for your endless support from the beginning of this crazy ride to the end. I'm still blown away that you decided to hang it up in the game once I did too.
Bobbi Jackson: It was an absolute honor to have you as GZWA's final champion. Keep doing great things in this game, you have a much better head on your shoulders than I do for all of this.
Randy, G, Roxi, Esyel, Valkyrie, Syreena, Juliana, Jenny, Kylie, and so many more that I still keep in touch with on Discord and social media regularly: Thank you for showing me that our friendships aren't limited to the realm of e-fedding.
Everyone still a part of Divinity Unlimited: Thank you for sticking by my side and not letting my idea/concept die with my departure to the game. Many thanks to Roxi taking the reins for me.
