Billie Eilish is opening up about the body image issues she dealt with as a teenager with the benefit of hindsight.
The seven-time Grammy winner spoke to Vogue for the magazine’s first-ever video cover, and in the accompanying interview, she recalled her early struggles with self-image.
Eilish said she sustained a growth plate injury in her hip when she was just 13 years old, dashing her early dream of becoming a professional dancer.
“Going through my teenage years of hating myself and all that stupid shit,” she explained, “a lot of it came from my anger toward my body, and how mad I was at how much pain it’s caused me, and how much I’ve lost because of things that happened to it.”
Eilish noted that her injury occurred shortly before the release of “Ocean Eyes,” her 2015 debut single, “so, music kind of replaced dancing.” Several lower body injuries later, she learned she had a condition called hypermobility, meaning that some of her joints could bend beyond the typical range of movement.
“I felt like my body was gaslighting me for years,” Eilish said. “I had to go through a process of being like, My body is actually me. And it’s not out to get me.”
Watch Billie Eilish’s Vogue video interview below.
The “Bad Guy” singer has been frank about her evolving relationship with her body for some time.
Speaking to The Guardian in 2021, Eilish acknowledged she was “obviously not happy with my body,” adding, “It’s such a loss to always try to always look good.”
She told the publication: “When I’m on stage, I have to disassociate from the ideas I have of my body. Especially because I wear clothes that are bigger and easier to move in without showing everything — they can be really unflattering. In pictures, they look like I don’t even know what.”
She continued by describing her relationship with her body as “terrible” when not on stage as well.
“Because I have such a terrible relationship with my body like you would not believe, so I just have to disassociate,” she said. “Then you get a paparazzi picture taken when you were running to the door and had just put anything on, and didn’t know the picture’s being taken, and you just look how you look, and everyone’s like, ‘Fat!’”
Elsewhere in her Vogue chat, Eilish addressed her passion for climate activism and praised other activists in her age demographic who were taking similar steps to raise awareness of the cause.
“I wish I could just make changes in my life and save the world alone,” she said. “Grow my own food and live off the grid. Erase my carbon footprint. But all that does is erase me. When really, if every single person just did half of what they should do, we could fix this.”