A'ja Wilson explained why she said she hates being A'ja Wilson some days

Las Vegas Aces center A’ja Wison cried during a locker room speech last September.

Wilson tallied 1,000 points in a single season that day, making WNBA history. In a tearful postgame moment with her team, she lost it, revealing that what she does daily takes a toll.

“Y’all will never understand how much y’all mean to me because it’s days where I hate being A’ja Wilson. I hate it,” Wilson said then.

In a new interview with Time‘s Lucy Feldman, Wilson explained why she shared such a heavy sentiment with her team. “Being a professional athlete, people assume that you’re supposed to be this perfect human being; you have no worries,” Wilson shared. “Why are you even complaining?”

Here’s more from the Aces center on some of the challenges she faces:

“You live this beautiful life—when they fail to realize that we’re still human and things hurt my feelings. I needed my teammates to understand that there are days where they may see me and they’re like, ‘That’s our captain,’ but there are also days where I’m faking it because I know that I have to show up for them.”

“There’s days where I’m struggling. It’s moments where, no matter how hard you work, it still feels like you’re not getting the recognition. It still feels like somebody’s got something to say. I needed them to understand that they help me in more ways than they’ll ever know. It’s hard showing up every day and wearing this crown. It’s heavy. It gets extremely heavy…”

“I hate that it came out in tears, because people are like, ‘Oh, girls are always crying.’ But it’s real. My whole point that I wanted to get across is, one, mental health is important. If your mental health is not in check, you cannot survive in this world. And two, you’ve got to love on yourself a little bit.”