“I was giving it everything to seem normal.”

These are the words of acclaimed actress Selma Blair reflecting on the period of time before she was diagnosed with MS – the degenerative disease which affects the central nervous system.

She’d noticed something wasn’t right with her body for years – fifteen to be exact – but as a busy, working single mother, she couldn’t afford to slow down.

When she eventually sought advice for her symptoms, they were dismissed by medical professionals as merely over-exhaustion, an explanation which made her feel “ashamed”.

“I dropped my son off at school a mile away and before I got home, I’d have to pull over and take a nap and I was ashamed and I was doing the best I could and I was a great mother, but it was killing me,” she recalled on Good Morning America this week – her first interview since announcing her illness last year.

“I was dropping things. I was doing strange things… I was self-medicating when (my son) wasn’t with me. I was drinking. I was in pain.”

After years of fighting against her condition, her symptoms were finally “taken seriously” and she had answers.

The diagnosis of MS triggered a wave of relief. Finally, it made sense.

“I cried,” she shared. “They weren’t tears of panic. They were tears of knowing I now had to give in to a body that had loss of control and there was some relief in that,” theCruel Intentionsactress recalled.

As it turns out, she’d been experiencing a flare-up of the disease ever since her seven-year-old son Arthur had been born.

Now, the mother-of-one is sharing what life looks like with the condition.

“I am very happy to see you, being able to just put out what being in the middle of an aggressive form of multiple sclerosis is like,” she toldGood Morning Americahost Robin Roberts, adding that she has “spasmodic dysphonia” which has impacted her speech.

On telling Arthur of her condition, she recalled:

“He almost cried and said, ‘Will it kill you?’ I said, ‘No. I mean we never know what kills us, Arthur. This is not the doctor telling me I’m dying. Then he was like, ‘Oh, ok’,” she imitated.

In October last year, the 46-year-old actress shared a statement to Instagram revealing her condition.

It wasn’t until she fell over in front of a doctor in August, trying to sort out what they thought was a pinched nerve, that the diagnosis came about.

“I am disabled. I fall sometimes. I drop things. My memory is foggy. And my left side is asking for directions from a broken GPS. But we are doing it. And I laugh and I don’t know exactly what I will do precisely but I will do my best,” she wrote in the moving post.

This week, the star made her first public appearance since the announcement at the Oscars 2019 Vanity Fair after-party, custom cane in hand.

Wearing a pastel chiffon Ralph & Russo gown, featured a flowing cape, Blair told reporters on the night through tears: “It took a lot to come out here.”

Looking ahead, the star said she might experience improvements.

“[The doctor] said within a year, I could have, at the time he said, 90 per cent of my abilities back, so this is to say let’s meet again next year and see if I’m better,” Blair told Roberts. “If I’m not and I can still have a conversation, that’s good enough.”

For now, the actress says bringing awareness to the disease is her goal.

“I was a little scared of talking [in the interview] and even my neurologist said, ‘No, this will bring a lot of awareness because no one has the energy to talk when they’re in a flare-up.”

Adding with her signature humour; “But, I do because I love a camera.”