There is little in her young life that Billie Eilish did not open onbut she was relatively deprived of her experience with Tourette ssyndrome. Apparently it’s just because no one really asked about it.
David Letterman only broached the subject when she suffered an involuntary movement while filming their interview for My next guest needs no introduction. “If you film me long enough, you’re going to see a lot of tics,” she explained. The host asked if it was okay to discuss the condition, to which she replied, “Absolutely.”
“It’s really weird, I haven’t talked about it at all,” she said. “The most common way people react is to laugh because they think I’m trying to be funny. They think I am [ticcing] like a strange movement. And then they say “Ha” and I’m still incredibly offended by that. Or they go ‘What?’ and then I say: ‘I have the Tourette’.
“So many people have it and you would never know,” she continued. “A few artists have come forward and said, ‘I’ve always had the Tourette’. And I’m not going to denounce them because they don’t want to talk about it. But it was really interesting for me because I was like : ‘You do it? What?'”
The Grammy winner previously shared the diagnosis, which she has had since she was 11, on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, but hasn’t discussed it much since. “I’m very happy to talk about it,” she told Letterman. “I actually really like answering questions about it because it’s really interesting and it makes me incredibly confused. I don’t understand.
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Tics don’t happen when Eilish is carry out (or horseback riding, moving or “thinking and concentrating”), but this frequently happens offstage. “I never do any tics at all, because the main tics I do are constantly, like, I move my ear back and forth and raise my eyebrow and click my jaw and flex this arm here and this arm there . These are things that you will never notice if you have a conversation with me, but for me they are very exhausting.
“It’s not like I like it, but I feel like it’s…part of me,” she said. “I befriended him. And so now I’m pretty confident in that.