Heels.

Dear Wrestling,

I have always been a goody two-shoes. I got up to some mischief when I was a kid, but nothing worse than lying about where I was going and maybe a little light trespassing. And I never once got worse than silent lunch in school—not ever.

I was pretty wild, don’t get me wrong. In the summer I spent all day, every day on my bike or in the woods. I’d lead my sisters along a highway they are now horrified about to go to the music store, I took the axe from the shed and went into the woods and cut wood to feel better about whatever, I built little shelters, I’d fuck with creeks and dredge them or build tiny dams-all kinds of stuff, pretty much completely unsupervised. My parents trusted me, and that was mostly an ok decision.

But I never smoked or drank. I never threw rocks at people or cars—actually, got them thrown at me a couple times (it was a given that I was a witch according to one boy). I was wild, but in an Emersonian kinda sense—wild, but basically a good kid.

And I’ve always had this overdeveloped sense of justice and vengeance. Very, very concerned with fairness. My parents were hippies, if you couldn’t tell, and I never encountered hate or prejudice in the home. My dad also cheated on my mom when I was little and between the two things I basically thought that once my muscles got big enough, obviously I would be Wolverine, or Batman. Justice and the night, that’s me.

That’s ingredient one—it’s a lot together, sure, but think of it like herbes de Provence.

Ingredient two is my fictional life. I always say that I grew up in Narnia. If I wasn’t running around the woods or streets wishing I was a dryad, I was reading the Chronicles of Narnia. I read them hundreds of times. Of course I wanted to be on Aslan’s side. Whether that’s because I was a good kid or why I was a good kid, I’ll never know. They’re too entwined. The point is that I was certain early on about what a good guy was and what a bad guy was, and it was all spelled out in these books. I was a good guy, like Wolverine. I hated bad guys,and I wanted to help good guys.

Now, one might think that as I grew older these attitudes might become less rigid or a little more nuanced. Ohhhhh, buddy. Not so. My family life was a fair bit of a trainwreck by adolescence so this sense of honor and duty and righteousness was what I clung to when I was raising my two little sisters and trying to figure out how to live. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs isn’t rigid the way it’s drawn, but you still need a moment to breathe in order to start examining your codes and rearranging your internal life.

Eventually I got a bit better, saw a few shades of grey, but I still had pretty hard lines. Still thought, I’m definitely a good guy. I lose my temper sometimes, but holy snails, look what I’m dealing with! PTSD and mental illness and poverty, who wouldn’t lose it sometimes. (Hi, Double Standard! *waves*)

So people around me are often trying to get me to waver, to do things I think are wrong—little things, medium things—but, if it’s wrong there’s no such thing as little. Wrong is wrong. I won’t even kick a chicken in an RPG, because the point is to be immersed in this fantasy, right, and kicking chickens is Wrong. I won’t play baddies, even for alternate endings/storylines. I don’t *like* baddies. That shit is boring, anyway.

This goes on for years. Up until this last year, in fact.

When I discovered Kevin Owens.

At first I don't like Kevin Owens. He's a bad guy first off and secondly that mirror is entirely too accurate for my comfort. But as I watch, I find myself realizing: I like Kevin Owens. I fucking love him. A lot! He’s so sharp and clever, both with his words and with his actions—a powerbomb as a punchline, or a bow as a fuck you. He’s so, so good, and he’s soooo bad! What the hell?? Who am I and what have I done with me?? Worse, I agree with him, a lot of the time! The crowd is wrong to boo him, that ref was unfair, people shouldn’t ask you dumb questions!

It begins to occur to me. I turn to my husband one night as he’s loading the dishwasher.

“Honey…”
“Yeah?”
“I. Um.”

He looks up, concerned.

“What’s up?”
“I think I might be a heel…”

He just laughs: giggles and cackles and a couple guffaws.

“Yeah, babe. I know.”
“You know I am, or you know that I think I am?” I’m nearly panicking, here.
“Both?”
“But heels are bad guys! I can’t be a bad guy!”
“Ok, but honey, what did Willem DeFoe say about bad guys?”

“…oh no.”

It’s been a couple months now, and I’m starting to come to terms with the fact that (figuratively speaking) I’m a heel. Parts of it always made sense to me: I talk a LOT of trash, especially to those closest to me. I’m very committed to not caring about the opinions of those I deem unworthy of that kind of care—for instance, people who think that because I’m trans/nonbinary, I’m undeserving of civil rights. Fuck that, those people can go to hell and they definitely don’t warrant *my* consideration. People who aren’t coming to me in good faith is another example: if you’re starting out by trying to manipulate me or hurt me? No fucks given. Life’s too short and precious, y’all.

But my big insight, the one that really helped, was a version of DeFoe’s “Everybody thinks they’re righteous.” I think it’s slightly different than that: I think faces think they’re right, but heels are righteous. By this I mean, systematically, habitually correct—correct as a matter of course, and with years of accumulated rightness behind them. Of course they’re right, they’re always right because they’re always trying to be right, they’ve spent years learning what it is to be right and then trying to do only that.

Let’s take Neville as an example. For years he was a good guy. A fierce competitor, but he played by the rules and worked hard and knew that someday his time would come. But it didn’t. And then he learned that he wasn’t right: the right thing to do, the actual rules to play by, are to seize not your own, but any opportunities, to force them into existence—those are the rules winners getting ahead had been playing by, and the rules he’d been following were what they told chumps to keep them out of the way.

So he follows the real rules, and he wins, and he is righteous.

Kevin Owens loves his family more than anything, they are so so precious. They’ve made so many sacrifices for him to live his dream, and so now all he wants in this world is to provide them anything and everything they could want. And so he does. He fights and works his ass off and cuts whatever corners are necessary, because he is doing the right thing for his family. Supporting your family is righteous.

Someone like Bray Wyatt is easy: he’s God, obviously he’s righteous. The Good Brothers play by a code of wrestling/lockerroom etiquette that’s older, and operates as an appeal to authority in a way, and that authority makes them righteous.

Sometimes righteousness relies more heavily on kayfabe: supposedly Brock Lesnar is the best wrestler in WWE and therefore righteous by way of his superiority—while in the real world no one who shows up to work so little can be called superior.

This difference between righteousness and doing the right thing is one of the hundreds of things I wish the culture generally would learn from wrestling. In Religious Studies we call this the difference between an open and a closed worldview—between knowing that you definitely have all the answers and are sure you know how to behave, and the ability to use a moral imagination. Moral imagination is one of my favorite ideas ever: the ability to imagine your way out of a moral conundrum. The peaceful protest movements of the 20th century are wonderful examples.

And now we get to Sami. Moral imagination is punk as fuck: society says that poor people don’t deserve to exist or that innocent people in the Middle East deserve to get bombed? Nope, we are agitating and writing music and dropping right the hell out of the kind of evil society that would hold such a view.

Sami is an open worldview personified. While he has a code, he is never certain of himself (at least, not until recently… 🤔). In scientific terms, he checks and rechecks his work and never skates by on confirmation bias. He's open to being wrong. Compare to how Kevin reacts when things don't go his way. Now, I started this long before what Sami obliquely refers to as the character's 'new direction' and I am fascinated to see if my theory here bears out: so far so good, though. Kevin is right now, you see, Kevin is always right about everything therefore Kevin has the right answers--and worst of all, now there are right answers to be had, rather than simply a life to be lived.