Ronda Rousey knows a thing or two about battles. She was the first American woman to win an Olympic medal in Judo, faced the best in the Octagon, and even headlined WrestleMania! But now, at 38, the former UFC champion finds herself in a new kind of fight, not against an opponent, but against the feeling of losing herself.

In a recent interview on the Untapped podcast with Spencer Matthews, Rousey was asked if she was preparing for a comeback as she’s been recently sharing videos of herself getting back to her training routine on social media. Her answer was raw and unfiltered as she responded, “I am like deep in mom mode. I’m not in the studio, you know, I’m working out in my garage and I’m just trying to reclaim my body from motherhood.”

Rousey didn’t hold back. She described the postpartum journey as both miraculous and overwhelming as she continued, “You become like this human assembly factory and you completely like lose your own autonomy and… you literally… like a baby is like a parasite, it is like sucking the life out of you and just taking over everything…”

While it may seem like a complaint, it’s not. It’s the truth for many women, especially those whose professions require peak physical conditioning and athleticism. As such she further shared, “But it really does just take you over entirely and then when it’s over, when you’ve been completely sucked out and then there’s the person and you’re like left with what’s left over you’re like ‘Oh my god, will I ever be the same again?’ The answer is no, but you could be a new something, so yeah, I’m just trying to reclaim my bodily identity, if that makes sense.”

UFC fighters like Michelle Waterson have long spoken about the tug-of-war between career and motherhood. After all, male athletes don’t have to pause their primes to deal with childbirth and try to rebuild their careers, bodies, and more in its aftermath.

Rousey, a mother of two daughters and stepmom to her husband Travis Browne’s sons, welcomed her second child, Liko’ula, earlier this year. The caption for her daughter’s birth was poetic as ‘Rowdy’ described it as, “Our little girl came into this world during a windstorm into a city on fire, so grateful she made it safe and sound.”

But behind the beauty of that moment is the quiet, gritty process of starting over again. ‘Rowdy’ is no stranger to that either. After retiring from MMA in 2016, she reshaped her identity in pro wrestling, headlining major WWE events and collecting championship gold. But this challenge feels different.

And while her days of fighting under the bright lights might be behind her, Ronda Rousey is still in the trenches, driven by something far more personal than chasing a title, the desire to feel whole again. However, in the same interview, the former UFC champion made a startling revelation about why she never returned to the Octagon, and the answer wasn’t about fear or legacy. It was about survival.

Ronda Rousey finally opens up on her abrupt exit from MMA and combat sports

For years, Ronda Rousey stayed silent. Her abrupt exit from MMA, after back-to-back knockout losses, left fans confused. Critics accused her of walking away too easily. But now, she’s setting the record straight. And what she shared on the Untapped podcast might change how fans view the end of her fighting career.

She confessed, “I just felt like I couldn’t be honest about what I was physically going through without people feeling like I was making excuses for myself. I also feel like I didn’t owe anyone any explanation especially if they were going to s–t all over it.”

Behind the tough exterior was a far more delicate story, one shaped by migraines, concussions, and neurological damage that had quietly built up for years. Rousey revealed that she grew up with a history of epilepsy in her family and later discovered that her condition had been aggravated by years of head trauma, dating back to her judo days.

According to her a doctor at the Cleveland Clinic explained, “He was saying that people that get migraines are actually more susceptible to concussions and the more concussions that you get, the easier it is for these impacts to set off a migraine… so what we think was going on was we kind of ended up in this feedback loop of the more concussions I was getting the easier it was to set off these migraines.”

That’s not just career-ending, that’s terrifying, as she revealed, “This was like, I had to retire because this kept happening to me more and more often to the point where I would get a jab and I would basically go blind.”

To wrap things up, from reclaiming her body after motherhood to confronting a lifetime of hidden injuries, Ronda Rousey’s now peeling back the layers of a once-invincible persona. While ‘Rowdy’ may never step back into the Octagon, she’s still showing women everywhere, athletes or not, that no matter the hurdle, you can still fight and carry on your story on your own terms!