In the matter of months, WWE Women’s World Champion Liv Morgan has gone from a familiar face to one of the mainstays of the company’s weekly pro wrestling program Monday Night RAW.

Since April, the turn of WWE’s programming year, the 30-year-old pro wrestler from New Jersey has skyrocketed to become a main event attraction on the heels of a tantalizing storyline between her, the former WWE Women’s World Champion Rhea Ripley and Dominik Mysterio — a love triangle that could rival soap operas, driven forward by feigned fists and bodyslams.

Fans will finally get to see some payoff this Saturday when Morgan and Mysterio team up to fight Ripley and Damian Priest (Mysterio’s former on-screen teammate) in a mixed tag team match at WWE’s Bash in Berlin event. But for Morgan, the wait for this moment has been an even longer time coming.

“I really spent my whole entire career working to get to this point,” Morgan tells PEOPLE. “I’m just proud and I’m happy, because my journey was not linear at all. There were so many highs and lows, and I feel like it took such a long time. But in that same token, I’m so appreciative of that, because I know I’ve really, really, really earned this.”

In fact, Morgan’s journey to becoming a main event WWE star has been a quarter century in the making.

Morgan says she first fell in love with pro wrestling when she was about 5 years old, fighting six siblings for a spot in front of her family’s television set to watch WWE every week. Morgan, whose real name is Gionna Daddio, and her siblings — four older brothers, an older sister, and a younger sister — lost their father early on in her life, and the heroic figures on WWE television provided the kids with a sense of escape and fantasy each week.

After school, Morgan and her siblings would act out their wrestling dreams in the backyard on a makeshift wrestling ring made out of layers of lawn chair cushions and a thin rope strung around four chairs set up as ring posts. “It was not legit or professional at all,” Morgan laughs. “We made it work with what we had, and we loved it so much.” And, she quickly clarifies, “No one got hurt.”

Neighborhood kids would come watch Morgan, a self-professed “tomboy,” jump off the chairs onto her brothers, hosting haphazard matches until their mother wrangled them all inside for dinner.

“I loved the athleticism, the physicality, and the story behind it all,” Morgan says, thinking back to what drew her initial interest in wrestling as a kid. “I wanted to be just like my brothers. I wanted to roughhouse like them, I even dressed like them a little bit. And so I was watching wrestling, and I saw [former WWE women’s champion] Lita, she had these baggy pants and sneakers, and she was always wrestling the boys. So, I saw myself in her and it just stuck with me. It was such a good distraction from my home life and whatever was going on at the time. I’d put it on, forget the world, and fully immerse myself in it.”

And as Morgan’s siblings moved on from wrestling, her dreams remained steadfast on the ring. She competed in cheerleading in high school and later got a job serving at a restaurant while attending a local community college — all while still watching WWE every week.

Serendipity struck one day when Morgan immediately recognized a pro wrestler walk in the restaurant. “I love the WWE, I want to be in the WWE!” she remembers telling them between taking orders. Morgan managed to get contact information for Joe DeFranco, an athletic trainer who trained the likes of WWE’s Triple H, Stephanie McMahon, and The Undertaker. And six months after she began training with DeFranco, Morgan found herself standing in a WWE ring for a tryout at the company’s training center in Orlando, Fla.

“It was just the craziest blessing of my whole entire life,” she says, thinking back to those whirlwind six months. Morgan says her siblings were “in shock” that she was now a WWE superstar. “Things like that didn’t happen to us,” she says.

Morgan made her in-ring debut with WWE in 2015, eventually earning a spot on television and winning her first WWE Women’s Championship in 2019 by defeating UFC Hall of Famer Ronda Rousey. And in the meantime, Morgan landed her first acting role in the 2023 comedy thriller The Kill Room alongside Uma Thurman, Joe Manganiello, Samuel L. Jackson and Maya Hawke.

“I hope to dabble more in that space,” she says, but for now her focus is what it always has been: professional wrestling. “WWE is my first love and my biggest love. I’m still loving and enjoying my career with no plans on slowing down or stopping.”