Selma Blair Says She Is ‘Very Much Stronger’ In Multiple Sclerosis Battle

Last week, at the 2023 Glamour Women of the Year Award, Selma Blair was honored.

She arrived in a navy lace gown and a Lingua Franca sweater that had the names of disability activists sewn on it. These names included Alice Wong, Andraéa LaVant, Judy Heumann and many more.

Blair won the Daring to Disrupt Award for her work as an activist.

“It is such an honor to be an advocate for people with disabilities,” she said upon receiving the award.

Blair was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2018.

In an interview with ABC News, Blair admitted that she cried when she got her diagnosis.

“They were not tears of panic,” she said. “They were tears of knowing.”

She talked about the relief that came with her diagnosis.

Although she had suffered from it all her life, she was only able to get a diagnosis years later. She described the pain as having been “been, for really many, many years, burning.”

She wrote about her illness in her new memoir Mean Baby: A Memoir of Growing Up.

She went through hematopoietic stem-cell transplantation therapy, and in 2021, she announced she had entered remission and had no new lesions forming.

She spoke of her recovery, saying it took “a long time” and is “feeling really, really much stronger now and building stamina.”

She continues to advocate for disabled people and proudly introduces herself as such.

“I became a kind of face for the disease, an advocate for something that matters to me. Though it’s a role I never thought I would play, it has become who I am.”

“It is important to talk about it. When it comes to chronic illnesses, there’s a lot of shame in disclosing one’s experiences,” she said.