I’ve always felt like the plus-one in life—not the one invited, but the one who is brought along to make up the numbers. I’ve never really felt I belong anywhere.
These are the things I think about, lying here on this bed. Thatfeelings spigot—which had been turned off for my entire life because I had to go out and work—is fully open. I’m fifty-three as of this writing and feeling everything, for the first time. I pushed all my feelings down into a Little Ball of Trauma™ in my stomach, but that ball is being pulled apart these days. And the tears feel different, profound, guttural. They’re coming from a place that I don’t even fully understand.
For so much of my life, I’ve felt like the good underlies the bad, but something strange has happened, something I’m not used to. I won’t lie anymore, be the good girl, and say that any of this is a blessing, but there’s some shred of self-understanding that continues to slowly emerge as I tell the story of these past fifty or so years. I want to talk to that little girl who always thought she had to be perfect. Maybe that’s what this book is.
All this has left me unable to be polite anymore—it’s boring and it takes too much energy. Being kind and loving and nurturing is beautiful, but to be polite is almost to lie. To be respectful is important, but there’s something about that sweet politeness demanded of women that stinks of faking our true feelings.
I have done the Superwoman thing once before, after my double mastectomy. I thought I should tell everyone that it was a blessing, when in reality, my body looked like Lorraine Massey, the once beautiful, then grotesque ghost in room 237 at the Overlook Hotel inThe Shining.I was determined to never do that again. I was going to be honest this time. I hoped I’d never have to face the choice, but here we are. (Actually, I’m sadder about the mastectomies now when I look down at my body than I was immediately afterward.) With my broken metatarsal, well, a broken bone heals. With the cancer, it was taken out of my body, and I was able to move on.
But MS is my constant companion. In fact, I will probably goawaybecauseof it. It scares me to death. I don’t want to dance with this pain anymore, and I don’t want to be in the predicament I’m in. Everything about it sucks.
My knees feel like I have bricks attached to them, heavy and painful. My skin feels like it’s got third-degree, fourth-degree, fifth-degree burns. Something is constantly stabbing at my ankles. When I put my feet down on the ground when I wake up, it feels as if the floor is made of needles, yet I can’t feel them because my feet are completely numb. Somehow it manages to be both things at once.
All my nerve endings are on fire, sending the wrong signals back to my thirty-lesioned brain. This accounts for the pain I feel twenty-four hours a day. Some days I can get through it, but I’m usually at an eight on the pain scale even if I appear fine. When I walk from my room to Sadie’s room, one of my favorite things to do, the pain is almost unbearable—and her room is just down the hallway from mine. And then if (when!) her room isn’t picked up, I don’t have the balance to get around the things on the floor.
I wish I could say that I am a miracle. Thirty lesions and still kicking. Though most days it’s very hard to believe, and in any case, I don’t want to minimize what this disease does to a human body and soul. MS is a disease of progression, but it’s also a disease of roller coasters. Some days I can bear to dance, others I fear the wheelchair.
That’s whyMeSsy,the podcast I host with my dear friend Jamie-Lynn Sigler, avoids any kind of sugarcoating when it comes to the terrible disease we share. To me, this is part of showing my real self to the world. We’ve created a sort of MS family through this radical honesty that has led to genuine bright spots, not thoughts and prayers and platitudes. I even met Doug the Pug through the larger MScircle. MS sucks, but the MS community rocks. It took me a long time to lean into that though.
While we were making season 3 ofDead to Me,some putrid paparazzo snapped a picture of me in a wheelchair. From there, it was assumed that my character had gotten in an accident, so I had no choice but to announce on social media that I had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. I was heartbroken.
The upside is, I think you become a fully human being when people realize you’re going through something. I never leave home without my cane. I use it both as a way of not falling and as a barrier. When I carry it, I’m saying, “Nope, don’t fuck with me. Don’t knock me over. Step back.”
Sometimes when a person is in agony it’s best to leave them be. My best girlfriend recently went through a horrible tragedy in her life, and at a fundraising party, she turned to me and said, “If one more person looks at me and asks, ‘How are you?’—ugh!”
I knew how she felt. OnDead to Me,we kept the diagnosis to a small group at first, but eventually everyone knew something was wrong because I was showing up to set in a wheelchair. Finally, I brought the crew together.
“I need you guys to understand that what you’ve been seeing is actually multiple sclerosis,” I said. “And I need you to do me a favor. Please don’t ask me how I am in the morning. You can say, ‘Hey, bitch!’” A few chuckles rang through the crowd, and I flipped them off as a thank-you. “Anything but ‘How are you?’ Don’t ask me. Because the answer’s going to be the same every day: not good. That’s how I am.”
Across the months, I’ve become much better at answering the “How are you?” question. It’s much easier to answer when you don’t worry about what the other person wants to hear.
The true answer is, I’m pissed off. Everything is an effort. Humor disarms the look of concern and pain my friends can’t hide when they see me. I don’t mind the jokes. Comedy has always been my armor; how else am I going to stop the tears? I don’t want to sit here and cry all the time. I have too much to do with what I have left. I am a mother, after all.
Oh, did I mention I wear a diaper? Diapers are very MS chic because many of us have incontinence issues. So fun! But at least they make black ones now. Jamie and I want to start our own diaper line. Each one would have a simple message printed on it:
FUCKTHIS
So if you really want to know how I am: I had to pull shit out of my own ass earlier today because of my disease. Oh, and I fell.
But thank you for asking.
Years ago, I was trying on some pants at Fred Segal, and they were size 2, which is very small. I remember this because usually I was a size 0, and the costume people onMarried… with Childrenwould often have to take my clothes in. I was bone, bone, bone.
When I looked in a mirror, I saw something no one else saw, but I always did. I worked so hard on my body, but I was never satisfied.
Then I shotJust Visiting,the movie where someone on the set had been so cruel to me, in London in 2000. When we finally wrapped and I’d made it to the airport to go home, I felt like a kidnap victim who had finally been released and was now running toward their family members. I heard later that my friend Jean Reno, who was also in the movie, went into the office of my aggressor and flipped atable on him. In his beautiful French accent, Jean reportedly said, “If I ever zee you treat zomeone like zat again, I’ll ferking kill you.”
When I got back from London, I got a lot of help for my dysmorphia, even though it would linger. One night, my friends were at my house, and we ordered from Pace, the famous Italian restaurant in the Canyon. They serve a delicious salad called the insalata vegetale. Filled with zucchini, squash, green beans, tomato, garbanzo beans, and olives, it also boasts tons of provolone and fresh mozzarella, as well as being dressed in a red wine vinaigrette. The cheese and the oils were not going in my body, no way, so I asked for no cheese and no dressing. One of my friends, overhearing my order, said “No cheese? But that’s thefunpart!”
Something changed that night. I got it with cheese, and since then, I’ve never gotten it without. I eat the whole damn delicious thing.
My relationship with food is so much better than it ever was, but it took a long time to improve. It was helped by doingSweet Charity,because to do that show I had to be an athlete. I had to be strong and had to keep up my nutrition.
When the MS hit, the stability I’d fought so hard for went haywire. I had to take fifteen hours of steroid infusions, and immediately everything just went like a fucking blob. It’s all documented on the last season ofDead to Meand at my Hollywood star ceremony.
By November 2022, when I was to receive my Hollywood Walk of Fame star, I didn’t even look like “Christina Applegate” anymore. All the medications and ravages of the disease had loaned me entirely the wrong kind of facelift.
The day I got my star was about the first time anyone had seen me since my diagnosis, and I felt humiliated. I thought I’d even have to go off the rack for the ceremony—and no one goes off the rack in this town—until Christian Siriano came to my rescue and made me something beautiful to wear.
