Billie Eilish’s Lifelong Medical Condition ‘Makes Easy Things A Lot Harder’
Grammy-winning musician Billie Eilish has been in the public eye for most of her life. Throughout that time, she’s had a complicated relationship with fame, and once admitted that she has a condition that “makes easy things a lot harder.”
Billie Eilish has been living with Tourette’s syndrome
According to Billboard, Eilish mentioned in a 2018 post on her Instagram Stories that she was diagnosed with Tourette’s syndrome when she was young.
“I’ve never mentioned [my Tourette Syndrome] on the Internet because nobody thinks I’m deada**,” Eilish wrote. “As well as the fact I’ve just never wanted people to think of Tourette’s every time they think of me.”
She confessed that she had never thought about telling her audience about her Tourette’s diagnosis, but felt that it was necessary to do so after seeing fan video complications of her tics. “[I] wasn’t planning on talking about this on here maybe ever, but it’s gotten to a point,” she said honestly.
Billie Eilish’s ways of dealing with her Tourette’s
She admitted that many people might not have even known about her condition. “My tics are only physical and not super noticeable to others if you’re not really paying attention,” she contended.
Still, she’s so used to it at this point that it’s a part of her. “My Tourette’s makes easy things a lot harder. Certain things increase and/or trigger the intensity of my tics. But it’s something I grew up with and am used to,” she said. “My family and closest friends know it as a part of me.”
She added “I’ve taught myself ways of suppressing my tics and certain techniques to help [reduce] them when I don’t want to be distracting in certain situations,” she wrote.
She’s a Grammy-winning superstar today
When Eilish shared her Tourette’s diagnosis in 2018, she was a rising star in the music industry with a bright future ahead of her. The following year, she released her smash debut album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? The single “bad guy” went on top the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The LP won Grammy Awards for Album of the Year, Best Pop Vocal Album, and Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical, while “bad guy” won Record of the Year and Song of the Year.
In 2021, Eilish released her sophomore album Happier Than Ever. She took a mugh lighter approach to her music on the project, instead choosing to lean in to her emotions instead of trying to run from them.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, she admitted that she’s moving past her old habits of bottling up her thoughts and feelings instead of sharing them with others. Still, she wants to keep her personal life as personal as possible. People are like, “‘Well, you’re an artist, so when you put something out there like that, you can’t expect people to not dive into it more.’ Yes I can,” she said. “You should absolutely respect me giving you this much information and saying, ‘This is all you get.’ The rest is for my own brain.”
