When asked if she’d tried to maintain her friendships amid her career, Billie admitted: “I think I felt resentful… I was so young; everything I felt back then, I don’t think I would even stand by. Literally, the world was being handed to me on a silver platter, like: ‘Would you like this?’”

“So all of my friends became my employees, which I felt was fine, and I was like: ‘What do you mean? I have friends, I have so many friends!’” Billie continued. “Then it was my 20th birthday, and I remember looking around the room, and it was only people that I employ, and I was like, hmm. And all 15 years and more older than me.”

“Then one of my best friends who worked with me quit out of the blue and didn’t talk to me,” the star recalled. “And it was the worst thing that happened to me, and that made me realize, like, Oh, wait, this is a job, and these are really people that if they left me, they wouldn’t ever see me again. I kind of had this realization, like, Oh, I might actually be alone for real.”

Billie also said that she would often find herself in romantic relationships where her partner was her only friend, so she would stay with that person longer than she probably should have because they were all she had.

Eventually, Billie made a proactive effort to expand her circle, explaining: “I’ve become very distant in that way from people that I work with, and I have a very weird relationship to being friendly with people that I work with because I’m very freaked out by loss and I have a lot of abandonment problems.”

“Then I worked really hard on friendship and making friends and making new friends and rekindling old friendships,” she went on. “About exactly a year ago, I reconnected with a bunch of old friends, and now I have so many friends; I have a crew now! I could literally cry about it. It’s been the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me.”

That same evening, Billie said that she “burst into tears” because she was so happy to have friends at last.

“I could not go on,” she added. “I couldn’t go on without friends. My friendships are, like, the best part of my life.”