crazy is the new black (and blue)

I did not grow up a wrestling fan, but I became one by falling for a wrestling fan and being in his proximity through countless episodes of Raw, SmackDown, the occasional NXT, and numerous pay-per-views. And seeing all that, I wasn't a big fan of how the women were portrayed. 

And then I saw AJ Lee. A tiny twig of a woman who skipped around the ring and left her opponents in a pile with what looked like relatively little effort, AJ didn't take anything from anyone and she didn't back down from a fight. In her Chucks and jean shorts, she ravaged anyone who came close to her in the ring and skipped away again, knowing just how powerful she is. 

So when I found out she wrote a book, you know I had to read it. 

Crazy Is My Superpower is a wild ride of a journey, starting from her childhood through school, through breaking in to independent wrestling to making it to the top of the heap in the WWE. She has an indomitable spirit that kept her going through heart-breaking poverty, through discouragement, through injuries, mental illness, and rampant sexism and misogyny. 

The stories from her childhood were painful to read, as she had to deal with her parents' financial woes as well as her mother's bipolar disorder. The youngest of three kids, she had her older brother and sister to help lift her up and break her down as only siblings can. But she did find a way to bond with her older brother--by watching wrestling on television. Because of these moments, twelve-year-old AJ decided that she was going to be a professional wrestler when she grew up. 

It took many years of training (read: getting thrown around a wrestling ring by large men) and a steely mindset as well as treatment for her own bipolar disorder to get her close to her dream, but all that work and determination paid off, as she was picked to strut her stuff before the company bigwigs within an hour of starting drills at a WWE developmental training weekend. 

It was AJ's grit, work ethic, and intelligence that made her a favorite with her wrestling coaches, but it was her resolve to stay true to herself and to her fans that made her a star. At a time when WWE wanted all their women wrestlers to look and act like strippers, when the women's matches were just a brief distraction from the longer men's matches, when the women got little respect and no merchandise, AJ rewrote the rules. She didn't look like the other WWE women, she didn't act like them, she didn't wrestle like them, and she ended up winning all the fans' hearts. The first woman in a decade to have her own merchandise line, AJ broke through one glass ceiling after another, proving that the women in wrestling deserve just as much respect as the men, and her influence can be seen in any WWE show on television today. 

Although she retired from wrestling because of an injury, it was inevitable that she would leave it on her terms, in her own time, and in her own way. Now married to another former WWE wrestler, CM Punk (real name Phil Brooks), she gets to pay it forward to other young women who grew up poor and struggled with crazy. I know I saw shadows of some of my own struggles with depression in her story, and I hope that this book and her attitude inspires others as it does me.  Her ability to take what others perceive as weakness and make it her greatest strength is as moving and powerful a story as I have read in a long time.

A self-described nerd, fan of comic books and video games, AJ is a tomboy and an artist. Crazy Is My Superpower demonstrates how well she can write as well as her passion for self-expression. With her talents, experience, and smarts, I know that whatever she chooses to do will be successful. As a devoted book nerd, I just hope that some of what she chooses will be to put more words on paper for all of us, fans of wrestler AJ Lee and of writer AJ Mendez Brooks. 

A copy of this book was provided by the publisher through BloggingforBooks.com.