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Professional wrestling champion Steph De Lander may have said it best as several WWE wrestlers left the company last week.
“Being released from WWE was the best thing that ever happened to my career,” she wrote on X. “It doesn’t have to be the end of the story!”
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Australian wrestler Steph De Lander poses before a match against Malaysian wrestler Nor Phoenix Diana in Puchong, Selangor on December 11, 2022. The match was organized by APAC Wrestling. (Arif Kartono/AFP)
De Lander lived it. The Australian native became a star in Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (TNA) following her departure from WWE in 2022 – where she won the TNA Digital Media Championship and had significant feuds with Matt Cardona and Sami Callihan.
Despite spending the last two years recovering from a serious neck injury, De Lander made her in-ring return last month in Awesome Championship Wrestling (ACW) where she defeated Indi Hartwell and J-Rod for the Women’s Championship.
She shared some advice on recent WWE departures in an interview with PK Press Club Digital.
Steph De Lander returned to the ring at an Awesome Championship Wrestling event in March 2026. (Photography by Jay Adam)
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“It’s such a different journey for everyone and you kind of have to go through the process of how it hits you because for some people it’s their ultimate dream, for some people they were ready to leave, for some people they stayed there for a year, they stayed there for 10 years,” she said. “It’s so personal. It’s so unique. But my advice would be to deal with the emotions and the feelings in the way that you need to, but if you want to continue wrestling as a career, once you’ve dealt with it or at least gotten to a point where you can continue to work, that’s when you have to get to work and hit the balls to the wall.
“Now you have the opportunity to rewrite your legacy. You have the opportunity to change the perspective of what people think of you and how they perceive you. And when you’re in WWE, you have no control over how you’re presented. When you’re on the indies, you have all the control. That would be my biggest piece of advice. You have so much more control over your career and your life than you think now. It’s going to be hard, it’s going to suck. Money won’t not up to what it is.”
De Lander has made a name for himself outside of WWE.
Steph De Lander makes her way to the ring at an Awesome Championship Wrestling event. (Photography by Jay Adam)
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She will make her next appearance for ACW on May 16 at the MJN Convention Center in Poughkeepsie, New York.
