Baylen Dupree Says She’s ‘Not Tourette Girl’ Despite Going Viral for Tics

Baylen Dupree was officially diagnosed with Tourette Syndrome just ahead of her 18th birthday, though she’d already been experiencing the tics for years. Looking back, her involuntary movements and vocalizations technically started during earlier childhood, but she didn’t think it was anything out of the ordinary.

“I felt like all the other kids were doing them. It was just normal,” Dupree tells PEOPLE exclusively. Around the age of 15, she experienced a return to the erratic motor and vocal behaviors, and those around her started pointing them out as well.

“I would go to the doctor and I would be like, ‘I don’t know how to explain this feeling, but I can’t stop,'” she says. “That’s the only thing and the only way that I would tell people, because I didn’t understand it, and I didn’t have information.”

Even today, at 22 years old, Dupree says she doesn’t consider herself a Tourette specialist simply because she’s been diagnosed with it. She maintains that she’s still learning about herself, her tics and “everything in between.”

But since her diagnosis in early 2020, she has gained a considerable amount of knowledge about her disorder, enough to help her spread awareness with her massive social media presence. The West Virginia native has over 10 million followers between her TikTok and Instagram accounts.

A television show, Dupree hopes, will give her a new platform to speak on the reality of Tourette syndrome, She wants to give the public an understanding of the science and offers tools for viewers to educate themselves. But she also emphasizes how people should

know that the way her Tourette manifests isn’t universal in every case.

“When you’ve met one person with Tourette, you’ve only met one person with Tourette,” she shares. “I feel like people need to know that it’s on a spectrum from mild to severe, and that’s how it should be looked at.”

For example, only 10% of people with Tourette have coprolalia, the involuntary swearing tic with which Dupree struggles, though it hasn’t always been present in her behavior. When her symptoms returned as a teen, she didn’t curse. Dupree unwittingly picked up the explicitives through innocent means: while spending time with family.

Dupree has a tight bond with her three brothers — Burke, 23, Sven, 16, and Vick, 13 — and her 19-year-old sister, Sammy. Though she says she has different, individual connections with all four of her siblings, she describes her relationships as generally “wholesome,” if not a little “crazy” at times.

“There’s a lot going on. There’s a lot of chaos, but I love it. I love having a big family,” she says. “I have a great support system. I have a great family. Very blessed.”

She’s gone out to visit her little sister, and she’s glad to see Sammy living well with her boyfriend, Junior. Eventually, Dupree hopes to reach that stage with her own boyfriend, Colin. In fact, she sees a bright future with him, though his work in the U.S. Air Force has threatened to keep them apart.

Colin’s impending relocation for training is one of the hurdles presented in Baylen Out Loud that has nothing to do with her Tourette syndrome. Neither partner wants to be apart for several months at a time, especially considering Colin’s soothing effect on Dupree. She often describes him as her “medicine.”

“He is the prescription that I’ve needed for a really long time that never runs out. It was just meant to be. He just understands me so well,” she tells PEOPLE. “He distracts me from a lot of the things that consume my day and my time … It just really helps just having someone there who gets it and understands me.”

Colin and Dupree met on a dating app. He’d never actually met anyone with Tourette, but he was willing to learn. “He was very observant,” she recalls. He watched her with her parents and with her friends. After their first date, Colin went through Dupree’s TikTok to learn more about how her specific condition operates.

“He still is [learning], but I mean, so is everyone else. I am still learning about it. My parents are still learning about it. There’s so much more work that needs to be done to educate more people and to understand fully what people are going through and dealing with,” she notes.

“But I hate when people are like, ‘He’s so patient with you,'” Dupree says. “I’m like, people have to be patient with everybody. My dad’s got to be patient with my mom, and my mom’s got to be patient with my dad, and neither one of them [has] Tourette.”

In reality, it’s Dupree’s patience that stands out so impressively. In public, her tics are often met with stares and whispers — or at worst, hostile confrontations — from nearby strangers. Instead of meeting their rude responses with anger, Dupree leads with grace.

“I understand that it’s very out of the norm to have someone in a store screaming or yelling things,” she says. “I’m not trying to pay attention to everyone else’s problems [with] me. I can’t help everyone, but one thing I can do is help myself.”