Last summer, Billie Eilish found herself in the throes of depression unlike any she’d ever experienced: “It was just realer than it’s ever been before,” she tells Rolling Stone in her new cover story.
Her mental health struggles came at a moment when she was grappling with some of the uglier, more distressing sides of fame and found herself seeking refuge at home. At one point, she wrote in her journal, in all-caps, “I know I’m lucky/But I’m so unhappy.”
“My whole life, I’ve never been a happy person, really,” Eilish says. “I’ve been a joyous person, but not a happy person. I experience joy and laughter and I can find fun in things, but I’m a depressed person. I’ve suffered with a lot of depression my whole life. When things happen in my soul, or whatever, the thing I’ve always held on to is ‘Well, it’ll pass. It’ll come in waves and it’ll get worse and it’ll get better.’ And that’s always brought me comfort. And this time, I literally was like, ‘I don’t care. I don’t even want it to get better.’”
Eilish says her family and childhood best friend helped her stay afloat during this time. And to help herself move past it, Eilish grew determined to get out of the house more and try to live as normal a life as possible, whether that meant grocery shopping, going to book readings, or getting Chipotle.
“I’m afraid,” she explains. “For a fucking good reason. I’m afraid of people, I’m afraid of the world. It’s just scary for somebody like me, and even if it’s not scary, it means being on and being vulnerable and being seen and being filmed and whatever. But with that all in mind, I have been choosing to do the thing that scares me more. I am biting the bullet and existing in the world for once.”
That quest for normalcy was also part of a larger effort to reclaim a bit of the person she was in 2019 — when she dropped her landmark debut When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? — as she worked on her third album, Hit Me Hard and Soft (out May 17). “This whole process has felt like I’m coming back to the girl that I was,” Eilish says. “I’ve been grieving her. I’ve been looking for her in everything, and it’s almost like she got drowned by the world and the media. I don’t remember when she went away.”
While Eilish is candid about her struggles with mental health, she says she is adamant about not wanting to be seen as a kind of spokesperson.
“I think it’s really weird when you are in the middle of something and somebody asks you to be the advocate for the thing you’re in the middle of,” she says. “I understand that it’s important, and I understand that it’s an epidemic and it needs to be talked about, but I don’t want to fucking be the role model for depression. What happens when I do some shit y’all aren’t going to like?”
