Interview with Erica D Porter, Jungle Grrrl

Erica D Porter. You might know her as Bone-ette from the wrestling scene in the original Spiderman movie starring Toby McGuire, or Jungle Grrrl on Women of Wrestling. You might have seen her book Eat That Monkey: Now Is the Time to Change Your Life or listened to one of her motivational talks. Or you may even be lucky enough to attend her gym, Endorphasm. To me, she is a role model, someone comfortable in her own skin, someone young girls can look to and emulate even if they don’t plan on being professional wrestlers or trainers. That’s why I chose to sit down with her on this windy day in Cape Cod.

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            She also opened up to me about her cancer diagnosis. “Carlo pretty much knew something was wrong and had been asking me to go to the doctor. And I am not a doctor person so I refused until we were away on vacation. It was in the midst of co-vid and it was the beginning of June 2020. We were staying at my in-laws in South Carolina and I was having difficulty climbing up and down the stairs. I was getting really short of breath, and winded and so I said “Okay, when we go back I will see a doctor and see what’s happening. It’s not Co-vid; it’s been going on for too long” At the time, Erica could not disclose to the doctor’s about some of her symptoms such as the shortness of breath because they would not see her (due to Co-vid) so she just said she wanted to get a mass looked at.

            “So I was in  the doctor’s office in a mask, she came in in a mask, did an ultrasound, and…you know you can see somebody’s facial features change even through a mask so I could see her whole face change. And she said “You have a stage 2 diagnosis because we can see it in the lymph nodes as well” She brought in a whole team of nurses and I was like “No offense, I understand what you are trying to do but I really don’t need somebody in here. I would rather process this by myself than to have a whole bunch of people in here that don’t know me” When she left the office, she called her partner. “That was the first of only two times Carlo has cried and so I said you need to get our son out of the house. His reaction was more painful for me than for my own reaction”

“Going through the process, I was not angry. I was not sad.  I was not anything other than ‘Okay what in this process can I control myself?” Erica started her own cancer foundation, Endorphasm Foundation. “While medicine is great and it is and it does a beautiful job, doctors are treating a disease, not the whole individual. There is a whole human side not addressed, because they don’t know. That is not how they practice medicine” She said “I noticed while I was going through my treatment I moved everyday. I still taught my classes, I did chemotherapy, I would go and work out and then I would hear stories about how people couldn’t even walk to their mailbox”

“You don’t think about it, but the more you move the more energy you  have,” she observed. “I said, I cannot be alone in recognizing benefits of moving as much as you possibly can” Erica notes that some people relinquish all of their control to the medical community. “They don’t recognize their own power in all of it, what they can actually do, and how they will feel in the process……You’re doing something for yourself that doctors and therapists…they can’t do it for you, that’s yours. It’s not about the physical part. It’s about what it does for you emotionally”

“A lot of time I don’t believe there are accidents or mistakes in life. I believe we decide how we are going to react. I think about a cancer diagnosis and I think ‘Who better than me?’ I really believe in the things that I say and I live them. I would never tell somebody to do something I wouldn’t do myself…In a way it’s a blessing. There’s the saying God never gives you more than you can handle. Whether you believe in a God or don’t believe in a God….I believe we have choices with what we are dealt”

Since Erica has Stage 4 systematic cancer she will never be in remission. Cancer started in the breast, spread to the lungs and the bones. “Now the word I look for and the only word I care about is ‘stable”

To young girls growing up, Erica says to trust who you are. “Part of the beauty of the world is that not a single one of us is the same” She likens it to rocks along a beach. Some might be similar, but no two are the same. “The one thing that is the common denominator among all people is that time is the equalizer of all men. I think about on my deathbed….people want more time.  More time to love somebody, more time to show people things….there’s not a single person whose time has come who says ‘I wish I was five pounds lighter’…. None of that shit matters. What matters is how you made others feel. And how did the people in my life make me feel. And if you are uniquely who you are, you’re going to make others feel pretty good”