AJ Lee was a guest on Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s StarTalk Radio this week to talk about her life in professional wrestling as well as her journey with bipolar disorder. Lee talks about the process of diagnosis and how medication can be an intimidating and different experience for the individual, and also explained how she related a lot to the Jean Grey “Dark Phoenix” character from X-Men:
“I thought that was a time when [The Uncanny X-Men writer] Chris Claremont was making women stronger and more of the leaders and to have this character that was a good guy, but could change and was the bad guy, I related to that duality and so I was so obsessed with that version of Jean Grey.”
AJ also talked about embracing the stigma of “crazy” and how mental illnesses shouldn’t be used against people:
“It was a very conscious decision to use a word that might be divisive. That it might make people…I might rub people the wrong way and I always kind of enjoyed that. And the point in doing that is when you have these words that make people go (gasps) you give the word, letters, power over you. And so for me, I’ve been labeled so many things. I’ve been called bitchy, I’ve been called loud, I’ve been called impulsive, I’ve been called poor, ugly, freak, rebel, crazy…
These were things that were used against me. They were sharpened and used as a weapon against me and when you own it and when you say being “crazy” has given me power and it’s given me talent that I wouldn’t have if I wasn’t. And being short and looking different than the other girls made me successful. It was the reason for my success. I own it now. I control it. I have the power. And I think that’s the first step in de-stigmatizing mental illness is there shouldn’t be hush words. We should be able to talk about it, joke about it as I do. I take nothing so seriously where I can’t make fun of myself. And that’s kind of the first step in conversation starting.
I can’t remember a time where I didn’t feel like there was something a little off with me, but I was only officially diagnosed when I was 19, 2o. So it took me awhile, but once I got diagnosed everything kind of made sense.”
AJ also talked about her goal as an advocate for mental health awareness, saying she wants to get people help earlier, noting her own mental health and how her family didn’t speak about it like it needed to be addressed:
“In my family, you didn’t talk about it. It wasn’t real and that’s why it took so long to start helping myself. So my goal is to get people to start help themselves a little bit earlier. I believe most people it takes 10 years between the onset of symptoms to getting any sort of treatment which is terrifying what can happen in those ten years.”
Related: AJ Lee Talks Mental Health & Pro Wrestling, Discovering Her Fandom With Neil deGrasse Tyson
