Suni Lee, the Olympic gold medalist who won in the women’s all-around in Tokyo last year, recently revealed that she has been dealing with Imposter syndrome.

Lee, 19, told ESPN how she has not felt good enough following critics’ comments around her Tokyo win.

“I feel like, after the Olympics, there’s just been so much doubt in like, ‘Oh, she shouldn’t have won Olympics, blah, blah, blah,’ and it really hits my soul,” Lee shared.

Lee has felt tremendous pressure to prove she earned the gold medal based on hard work and skill.

“because I think I just put in my head that I didn’t deserve to win,” She said.

As a freshman at Auburn, Lee was a member of the collegiate gymnastics team, the Tigers, where she earned all 10s across the board on two of her routines. Despite her outstanding athleticism, Lee finds herself in a scarcity mindset.

“Like impostor syndrome; that’s exactly what I have. And it’s very hard. It was very hard for me to motivate myself the first couple of weeks here because it was like I didn’t want to do gymnastics; I hated it,” Lee said.

After receiving gold, Lee has opened up about the high demands of being an Olympic winner. The pressures have pushed her to consider pulling herself out of the meets.

“I would have anxiety attacks at the meets,” Lee said. “Like the first couple of the meets of this season, I was a wreck because it was like constant screaming my name and like, ‘Suni, can you take a picture?’ or ‘Can you sign an autograph?’ while I’m trying to concentrate.”

Lee recalled having an anxiety attack that turned into a physical episode of shakes and heavy breathing while confronting coach Graba to tell him, “I can’t do this.”

“When everybody expects you to be good for Auburn, it’s really hard for me just mentally, because I already put so much pressure on myself that when I have that extra pressure stress added on to it, I just kind of break,” she said. 

Lee thanks Coach Graba for helping her “flip the switch” and understand what she “needs to be doing.

Now using journaling as a new outlet on her journey to healing, Lee recently shared a page from her journal on Twitter, which included positive affirmations, such as, “Have fun” and “You are good enough.”

“I think it’s important because a lot of the time, people forget that we’re human,” she said. “I think people just look at me as a famous person; they don’t actually look at me as a person, and to kind of see that we can make mistakes, too.”

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