Billie Eilish has said living with Tourette’s Syndrome is ‘very exhausting’ as she opened up about living with the condition in a new interview.
The Grammy and Oscar-winning singer was diagnosed with the condition - which affects the nervous system, causing tics - when she was 11, and she spoke to iconic US talk show host David Letterman for his My Next Guest Needs No Introduction series on Netflix.
Singer-songwriter Billie, 20, said she first began experiencing small tics when she was 11, such as ear wiggling, raising her eyebrow and flexing her arm muscles, throughout the day.
In one moment during the interview, she appears to turn her head and open her mouth, as host David asked if she had seen a fly.
“No I’m ticcing,” she explained, prompting David to apologise profusely.
“If you film me for long enough, you’re going to see lots of tics. I don’t care. It’s really weird, I haven’t talked about it at all,” Billie added, saying that the lights had triggered her tics.
She told the former late night talk show host that she was still baffled by her condition, but had learnt to live with it over time.
“I really love answering questions about it, because it’s very very interesting. And I am incredibly confused by it. I don’t get it,” Billie confessed.
“For me, they’re very exhausting,” she said. “It’s not like I like it, but I feel like it’s part of me. I have made friends with it. And so now, I’m pretty confident in it.”
Billie said it gets awkward when people think she’s being funny when she has a tic.
“The most common way people react is they laugh, [think] that I’m trying to be funny. And I’m always left incredibly offended by that,” she said.
The Bad Guy hitmaker also said that “so many people” in the music industry have it, but she wasn’t going to “out them”.
As the interview was coming to an end, David apologised for triggering her tics, and became concerned that the interview had made her condition worse.
“I hope to God what we’ve done here didn’t exacerbate this. I know nothing about this,” he admitted.
“Not at all,” Billie replied.
