It was this time last year that Zayda Steel appeared to be one of the top prospects in WWE’s ID program, frequently in contention for the WWE ID Women’s Championship. By the fall, however, Steel had decided not to renew her contract with WWE, and soon after joined AEW/Ring of Honor, where she quickly became a member of the Sky Flight stable alongside Scorpio Sky, Christopher Daniels, and Dante and Darius Martin.

Appearing on “AEW Unrestricted,” Steel touched upon how she wound up under the Tony Khan umbrella, revealing that she hadn’t expected to get picked up by AEW or ROH when she first hit the open market.

“I chose to walk away from my previous employment,” Steel said. “My choice. You know, I’m on my own journey. I love wrestling. I just want to embrace it and be around people that love it just as much as I do. So I chose to walk away. My plans, at first, were to go to Japan. I was going to take the last two to three months of the year as a little mental break, financial break, and I was going to go overseas and do it the right way this time. And five days after I tweeted that tweet, Tony Khan texted me. So plans changed.”

As for what went wrong with WWE, Steel revealed she first started considering leaving last spring, worried her time there was killing her motivation.

“I love wrestling, like I said, and this is my escape from reality,” Steel said. “And once I started to feel like my only escape was work, and I started to not like it and not have fun…I want to always love this, so I chose to walk away. As well as my mental [state], personally, I was losing myself. I was losing the love for wrestling, the only thing I’ve only loved. So it was…I was like ‘Yeah, I need to do my own thing.'”

If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit “AEW Unrestricted” and provide a h/t to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription