Blair has continued candidly sharing her roller-coaster journey on social media. Kris Jenner, who bonded with Blair after the actress played the Kardashian matriarch on FX’s The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story, has been closely following. “She really is sharing something so vulnerable, and so scary,” Jenner says. “She showed me what courage is, and how to be brave. I changed a bit of the way I live my life because of her.”

Blair has several motivations for being so forthcoming. First, she wants to ensure other women aren’t making the same mistakes with medical treatment. “With my previous doctor, I put on a good face, because he was a man. We had a joking relationship. I wanted him to think I was doing well, even though I would say, ‘I’m beyond tired.… I can’t stay awake.’ I wish he would’ve taken me more seriously,” she says. “I had been so embarrassed by some events in my life, whether it was drinking or immature behavior, that, as a mother, I wanted to prove I was great even when I was telling someone I had problems. That’s a shame. So, I’d like to counterbalance it by being really honest about how I am.”

Blair was surprised her honesty struck a chord with strangers. “I’m pretty much a nobody in Hollywood,” she says dryly. “But when I read comments on Instagram from people who were suffering, whether it was from M.S., or anything, I thought, Holy shit, there’s a need for honesty about being disabled from someone recognizable.” Blair can’t sleep much lately, so she has been trying to respond to many of the people who take the time to comment on her posts. “I care about the people on my damn Instagram,” she says. “An actor I admire said Instagram could have been a great experiment for the human condition, but instead it’s curated narcissism. And, yes, there’s some of that. But for me, it has been an exploration into the human condition.”

“A cane, I think, can be a great accessory.”

Blair grew up in a Jewish, upper-middle-class household in suburban Michigan, the youngest of four daughters to an attorney father and judge mother. Their family seemed normal from the outside, but Blair alludes to a simmering unhappiness, mentioning that she began drinking at the age of seven, after discovering the intoxicating effect of wine at Passover Seder. Asked what led her to drink so early, she only says, “I have a history of sadness,” before pivoting to happier thoughts. “I had some wonderful moments, too. We took amazing family vacations to Puerto Rico and Aruba and New York. We lived one life and vacationed another. And those bright spots, those dapples of sunlight in the pool, kept me going.” It wasn’t until she enrolled at Cranbrook Kingswood private school that she began to flourish creatively: “Keith Haring did our yearbooks. Yoko Ono came to speak.... That experience showed me there’s more than the dark hallway of my house and my brain. And movies did it for me. And fashion.”