Introduction

In 2026, I turn 40. It’s a milestone birthday—the kind that makes you pause, look at your life, and ask yourself questions you’ve put off for years. Who am I? How did I get here? What has shaped me, inspired me, carried me, challenged me?

For me, one of the clearest answers has always been pro wrestling.

From before I can even remember, wrestling has been a part of my life. 6:05 Saturday night on TBS in my dad’s house every weekend. It was the background noise of my childhood, the spark of my adolescence, the constant companion of my adult years. As I’ve grown older, my relationship with wrestling hasn’t faded like so many childhood interests do, it’s only gotten deeper. It’s become one of the ways I process the world. One of the ways I understand myself.

So as I prepare to step into a new decade, I want to spend this year exploring the “why” of that connection.
Why wrestling? Why has it stayed with me? What has it taught me? And what does my love for it reveal about the person I’ve become.

To do that, I’m writing about 40 wrestlers across the year, forty performers who, for reasons both obvious and deeply personal, have left an imprint on me. Forty people who entertained me, challenged me, disappointed me, inspired me, or helped me understand something about myself or the world around me. This blog is my attempt to trace the shape of my life through them.

These posts aren’t biographies, retrospectives or “greatest wrestler” lists.

They’re reflections.
They’re memories.
They’re pieces of my life filtered through the art form that has always meant the most to me.

Each entry will mix wrestling history with my own history. Moments that thrilled me, moments that broke me, and moments that brought me closer to the people I love. This project is part personal essay, part love letter, and part therapy. A patchwork autobiography made of headlocks and heartbreak, dragons and dropkicks, friendships, failures, and the slow, inexorable march of progress that will lead us all to happiness.

I’m choosing to do this publicly because I know wrestling has touched other people the way it has touched me. I know there are fans who’ve felt seen, comforted, or energized by it. Fans who grew up with it the way I did. Fans who are trying to make sense of aging, change, nostalgia, and where it all fits into our lives.

My hope is that you’ll find pieces of yourself somewhere in these entries.
That something I felt, you’ve felt too.
That something wrestling gave me, wrestling also gave you.

Wrestling, at its best, is the most powerful emotional storytelling medium I’ve ever encountered. No film, song, novel or painting has ever made me feel the way wrestling does at it’s best.  When it hits, it hits a place in the human heart nothing else reaches.

This project is my way of honoring that.
Honoring the wrestlers who shaped me.
Honoring the memories tied to them.
Honoring the people I watched with.
And honoring the person I’ve become along the way.

Thank you for reading, for caring enough to follow these stories.
And thank you, especially, if you’ve ever felt the same electricity in your chest that I’ve felt sitting in a crowded arena or on the edge of a couch, watching two people tell a story with their bodies that somehow made sense of my own life.

Here’s to turning 40.
Here’s to the wrestlers who helped me grow up.
Here’s to the ones who helped me survive.
Here’s to discovering who I am—forty stories at a time