Selma Blair admits that understanding her multiple sclerosis has been a weight lifted from her shoulders.
The Cruel Intentions star, 52, was diagnosed with the chronic immune disease in Aug. 2018, but kept it private until the following January. Speaking exclusively to PEOPLE at the PHM Healthfront 2025 Wednesday, April 30, Blair says knowing what you’re dealing with allows you to be “thrilled.”
“It’s so funny. I felt like people thought it had to be some tragic thing, but I was like, ‘No, you don’t understand,’” the actress tells PEOPLE. “I was feeling tragic inside before, and thinking this is just all psychosomatic and how can I change myself?”
Blair adds that for “as long as I can remember,” she wondered how other people were able to cope.
“How do they do that? How do they feel that way? How does that mom carry her baby and stay awake?” she recalls. “I just did not understand how I was so different from people, but yet totally kind of fine-ish.”
Finally getting the diagnosis from her doctor made her feel “so happy.”
“I finally just felt seen. I kind of joke like, wait, there’s receipts. This validates this vision here, this validates this or this or this, that people wouldn’t really see because with relapsing MS, it can go away. It can relapse.”
According to MS Society, a MS relapse is defined by the appearance of new symptoms, or the return of old symptoms, for a period of 24 hours or more.
The relapses can also vary from mild to severe.
Blair tells PEOPLE, “It’s like relapse remitting, so it can relapse and it can remit, and so as a kid you’d get something checked and then you’d go back [and] it’s not quite there, but you’re left with the shadow of it.”
Growing up, the sometimes symptoms caused an internal struggle when it came to wondering if she was actually okay or not.
“So my whole life felt kind of like gaslighting, even though no one was doing it intentionally,” she says.
Blair confesses it “took so many years” for her to come to terms with her diagnosis.
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“And that’s the part that I want to just tell people,” she tells PEOPLE. “Sometimes if we’re lucky enough, we’re still here at the end of these years to get better.”
The actress who is “not scared necessarily of dying” since “we all die,” adds, “I’m just so curious and I just wanted to hear everything about people’s experiences.”
“It was just kind of my light to just find stuff out and laugh with people that we both, we’re fine one minute and then we’re like, ‘Ugh, got to get to my bed.’”
Last week, while attending The Daily Front Row’s 9th Annual Fashion Los Angeles Awards on April 24, the Legally Blonde actress told PEOPLE she is “truly relapse-free” and is “feeling really well.”
Blair partnered with the 2025 Health Front, along with DotDash Media, to raise awareness for SurvivorNet as it expands its coverage beyond cancer and focusing on many other conditions.
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