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WWE was an opportunity to wrestle in front of thousands - in 2013, I did 227 matches, and almost all of them were in front of more than three or four thousand people, with a high of 70,000 plus. It was an incredible experience to be part of that.
I couldn't even speak in front of a group of students when I was in high school. I could barely do that sort of thing. But once I started doing the "YES!" chant down to the ring and people would do it with me, it allowed me to feel more comfortable.
That is one of the coolest things about WWE and wrestling in general. The fans have this very unique voice and this very unique power, and in no other sport and no other form of entertainment can the fans make their voices heard and it effect change.
Wrestling is more of a creative outlet, and especially for somebody like me, I view it as my creative outlet. Not all WWE superstars and not all wrestlers view it that way, but that's how I view it, and that's one of the ways my mind works creatively.
I have no problem with people eating meat. I would just like it, for the people who do eat meat, for the animals to be treated better. To be treated humanely. Cows in pastures living the life that they're supposed to live. I have no problem with that.
I always think of it in terms of music. You're not always going to be a huge rock star in music, but musicians can play until the day they die. With sports, it's different. You can't always do it until the very end, and that's a hard reality of sports.
For some reason, the fans got behind me, and I don't know exactly why that is. I wasn't supposed to main event WrestleMania XXX, but the fans were so vocal about it that the fans had no choice but to put me in the match. I've had a lot of lucky breaks.
My mind thinks in wrestling. As I'm thinking of things and my mind is being creative, it constantly keeps going back to wrestling. That's my inspiration, and to not be able to express that puts me in a spot where I almost don't know what to do with myself.
I get this anxiety in cities and places like that. When you grow up in kind of a small town and when you grow up around a lot of green and trees and nature and that sort of thing, sometimes I think it's a little mentally disconcerting to be around this concrete.
When I watch myself, I see nothing but faults, like, 'This I need to do different, this I need to do different,' and so if there comes a point in time where I'm like, 'Man, this whole thing is just getting really stale,' I am not opposed to being the bad guy again.
I have heard from people that the first year of marriage is the toughest. Brie [Bella] and I have definitely had our share of life difficulties with me having neck surgery and that sort of thing, but things are going really well and it is getting better after year one and that is phenomenal.
I keep trying to convince people that I'm OK to wrestle, and I think that's probably the hard part. A lot of times I'm trying to convince myself, too, that I can wrestle. It's really hard, because the concussion issue is very subjective, and that's the part that a lot of people don't understand.
When I first got to WWE, the head of talent relations was John Laurinaitis, who is now my father-in-law, and the first thing I thought when I saw everything that he had to do is, I thought, 'I would never, in a million years, ever want that job. You could not pay me enough money to have that job.'
Every year, I say the Seahawks are going to win the Super Bowl. There's no doubt in my mind every single year. And you have to keep in mind this was well before the Seahawks were good. This was, like, 2-14, drafting-Rick-Mirer Seahawks. I would still be saying they were going to win the Super Bowl.
My brain is - essentially, you take any college football player in the country, because I have had multiple, multiple concussions. I had 10 documented concussions, four post-concussion seizures and so, but, with that said, my brain is no worse than your average college football player's brain, right?
I've been wrestling since I was 18 years old. And within the first five months of my wrestling career, I'd already had three concussions. And for years after that, I would get a concussion here and there, and it gets to the point that when you've been wrestling for 16 years, that adds up to a lot of concussions.
I have no ambition for what society says is important as far as things like money, and all that kind of stuff. What I am ambitious about is I want to be the best wrestler that I can possibly be, and I think there's some sort of mistake in generations, as far as what he thinks as far as our generation lacking ambition.
I think of Bret Hart as somebody who held the Intercontinental championship like it was the World Heavyweight championship. Every title match he was in felt important, like it was the most important thing on the show. The way he carried himself and the matches he had, it was just everything I thought a champion should be.
I like going to Japan where they treat it like a real sport. I like doing the entertainment stuff with the WWE. I really like doing the small venue stuff, like Ring of Honor, because everything is so intimate. There's different feelings and different experiences, and you have to be good at different things to do all of that.
Wrestling is different to me. As I talk to other wrestlers, wrestling seems a little different to me than it does to a lot of them. To me, it's about an artistic performance and about honing my artistic performance in pursuit of these minute moments of perfection. These little encapsulations. And none of them are ever perfect.
My favorite wrestler growing up was Dean Malenko. He was a very technical wrestler, and when I trained with Shawn Michaels, he wasn't that kind of a technical wrestler. So, when I finally met Regal in 2001, he was that kind of a wrestler, and all of a sudden, I could ask him things, and he would know what I was talking about and how to do it.
If you would have met me when I first started wrestling - or even five, six, seven, eight years into wrestling - you wouldn't be like "This person is a dynamic personality on the screen." That would have never happened. That's something that's evolved. You just keep putting yourself out there and you keep working at that sort of thing and you can get better at it.
We are inducting Connor "The Crusher" Michalek into the WWE Hall of Fame with the Warrior Award, and it's going to be really hard with the waves of emotion that will set in. I will have to share with everyone what he meant to me and also deal with how sad his story is. He was so inspiring to people, it is going to be really emotional for me. It should be very special!