Although she was initially crushed by her departure from WWE, Xia Brookside remains hopeful for her future in professional wrestling.
In August, WWE announced its plans to launch a new NXT Europe brand, extending its ventures in the UK, to all across the respective continent. Amidst the ongoing expansion, the company’s NXT UK brand was subsequently shut down on a hiatus. As a result, several NXT UK Superstars were released from their contracts, including Xia Brookside.
In a recent interview with Sportskeeda Wrestling’s Riju Dasgupta, the 24-year-old admitted she was disappointed upon notice of her release. “It’s been the last four years of my life, and I feel like it’s been such a big part of my life,” she said. “I debuted with the WWE when I was 18, 19-years-old. I was still a teenager. Yeah, I’m at the end of my teenage years, but it was such a huge part of my life. And how much do you change between the ages of 19 and 24 now? That’s huge; so much development happens in that time, and all of my mine happened on TV for everyone to see.”
“We weren’t touring here [in the UK]. We weren’t touring, doing live events. Everything that we did was filmed. Every show that we did went on TV. There wasn’t room for error. So any error or any things that didn’t go ‘right,’ for example, they were on TV. I was learning on TV. It’s just crazy. I’ve grown so much in that time that when it’s taken away from you, you’re like, ‘hang on a minute. I just bought a house. I’m getting married.’ There’s so much coming up, and I was just like, ‘What do I do?”
Upon evaluating her future, Xia Brookside realized that she was going to be “fine,” and now has her eyes on achieving some new goals. “I just checked myself and I was like, ‘Well, you were doing it before, Xia. You’re fine.’ Then that’s when I was like, ‘No, I’m just gonna keep going. I’m gonna keep doing what I’m doing, I’m gonna hold my head up. I’m gonna do interviews like this and remind myself who I am, remind myself why I started wrestling.’ Because I feel like that’s the most important thing.”
“Everyone has setbacks, but it’s what you do with them,” she declared. “One day, I hope to wrestle in that ring again. I hope to wrestle for the WWE. I wanna be in America. But there’s so many things that I can do now too. I wanna go to IMPACT and wrestle Mickie James. That would be crazy. We just take every experience — in my opinion, I’m just gonna take everything that’s happened and see what crazy life I can bring myself. I wouldn’t have wrestled in Poland last weekend if I was still with them.”
“It’s an adventure. Let’s just hit every step of the journey and have fun with it,” she said.
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