“But I can do that. That’s the thing about diving into the hurt — I don’t need to do that,” Eilish said of the exposure. “I’m starting to do better, but I’ve not been doing so great, to be honest.”

“For a while. I have impending-doom feelings most of the day. When I think too much about it, how I can never have privacy again, it’s enough to make you want to do all sorts of crazy things,” she added. “But you have to let it go.”

Billie Eilish appears on the cover of Allure’s Best of Beauty issue.

Cho Gi-Seok

Eilish — who was thrust into the spotlight at the age of 16 with the release of her debut EP Don’t Smile at Me — has gone on to reach a worldwide level of success, from numerous award show victories to her two No. 1 albums and five top-10 singles.

Back in December, the musician revealed to the BBC about how “strange” it was to go from being “in the comments” online to becoming a topic of discussion. “Growing up in the public eye is a very bruising experience, and it’s really hard to grow and change,” Eilish said at the time. “I just didn’t really know what to do. I was just grasping at straws.”

And as Eilish told Allure Thursday, she isn’t the same person she was as a teenager. It took her some self-realization to understand that “you’ve got to change,” she said.

“When I was 17, I was like, I found it. I found the person I am, forever. This is how I’m going to do it. I found all the ways,” she shared. “These are my boundaries. These are the things that make me happy, and this is my recipe for how I’m going to make music and be happy. Then I grew up a little, and suddenly life was like, These aren’t going to work. You’ve got to change. You’re not that person anymore.”

Billie Eilish poses for the cover shoot for Allure’s Best of Beauty issue.

In fact, the singer-songwriter is still realizing new things about herself even at 21, she added. “There was this moment when I was in Paris, we were driving around, and I was in a bad place. It was not a good time for ol’ Bill,” Eilish recalled to Allure. “I was not getting better, and didn’t know when I would. And this motorcycle pulled up next to the car, and this guy’s helmet had a sticker on it that said in all caps, ‘Move on.’ I was sitting there like, Oh. Message received.”

“I have a really big problem with control, so I’ve been trying to teach myself that there are things out of your control and you have to move on,” she added.

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Eilish has also continued to learn more about herself through songwriting, too. Elsewhere in the discussion, the “What Was I Made For” singer opened up about her new song from the Barbie soundtrack, and how she and her brother Finneas pieced it together during a time when they “couldn’t have been less inspired and less creative.”

The song — which she previously first performed live at her headlining Lollapalooza set this year — “wrote itself” after they decided on the chords and opening lines, she added.

“I have the whole video of us writing the song, and the first thing we wrote were those lines in the first 10 minutes,” Eilish said. “We wrote most of the song without thinking about ourselves and our own lives, but thinking about this character we were inspired by.”

“A couple of days went by, and I realized it was about me. It’s everything I feel. And it’s not just me—everyone feels like that, eventually.”