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Professional wrestling champion Steph De Lander may have said it best, as several WWE wrestlers left the company last week.
“Leaving WWE was the best thing that happened to me in my career,” he 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, December 11, 2022. The match was organized by APAC Wrestling. (Arif Kartono/AFP)
De Lander has lived it. The Australian native emerged as a Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (TNA) star following her departure from WWE in 2022, where she won the TNA Digital Media Championship and had major feuds with Matt Cardona and Sami Callihan.
Although she spent the last two years recovering from a serious neck injury, De Lander made her in-ring return last month at Awesome Championship Wrestling (ACW), where she defeated Indi Hartwell and J-Rod for the women’s championship.
She shared some advice for recent WWE departures in an interview with Pak Gazette 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 a very different journey for everyone and you have to follow the process of how it hits you because for some people it’s their ultimate dreams, for some people they were ready to leave, for others, they were there for a year, they were there for 10 years,” he said. “It’s so personal. It’s so unique. But my advice would be to deal with the emotions and the feelings the way you need to, but then if you want to continue with wrestling as a career, once you’ve processed it or at least gotten to a point where you can continue to work, that’s when you need to start running and throwing balls against 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 see you. And when you are in the WWE, you have no control over the way you are presented. When you are in the indies, you have all the control. That would be my biggest advice. You have a lot more control over your career and your life than you think you have now. It’s going to be hard, it’s going to suck. The money is not going to equal what it did in WWE. But yes “You commit to it, put your head down and put in the work, there are a lot more opportunities outside of the WWE bubble.”
De Lander has made a name for himself outside of WWE.
Steph De Lander comes to the ring at an Awesome Championship Wrestling event. (Photography by Jay Adam)
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He will make his next appearance for ACW on May 16 at the MJN Convention Center in Poughkeepsie, New York.
