Since sharing in August 2021 that she had been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, Christina Applegate has been frank about the immense impact the condition has had on her life. On an episode of MeSsy, the podcast she co-hosts with Jamie-Lynn Sigler, who also has MS, Applegate admitted that she’s in “a real ‘fuck it all’ depression where it’s kind of scaring me a little bit because it feels really fatalistic.”

In the episode, which was recorded earlier this year shortly after Applegate’s surprise onstage appearance at the Emmys 2024 but was published online on Monday, she said, “I’m trapped in, like, this darkness right now that I haven’t felt in I don’t even know how long, probably 20-something years.”

Sigler, who received her own diagnosis over 20 years ago while still working on The Sopranos, commiserated with her friend while calling her “incredibly strong” and urging her to “give yourself a chance.”

“It’s so hard to live in a disabled body,” she said. “It is so hard. I will not take that away from you and I am right there with you.” Sigler urged Applegate to consider therapy and medication to help herself get through. “[The difficulty of MS] is not a reason enough for you to stop living because I sit here across from you and you still make me laugh like nobody else can. You still make me smile. You make me feel loved.”

“I can't let you give up,” she said. “I can’t. I need you to do it for me.”

Applegate said that she had gotten back in touch with her therapist and would resume sessions for the first time since her diagnosis.

“I have avoided therapy since I've been diagnosed because I'm so afraid to start crying and that I'm not going to be able to end crying,” she admitted. She copes through self-deprecation, like when she remarked onstage through tears that the standing ovation at the Emmys (“the hardest day of my life,” she shared, after which she slept for two days) was “shaming me with disability by standing up.”

On the podcast, she said, “I'm so afraid for those floodgates to open and that I won't be able to stop.”

However, she remarked, she was afraid that “I’m just going to shrivel up” if she didn’t change things. “This is being really honest,” she said. “I don't enjoy living. I don't enjoy it. I don't enjoy things anymore.”

Despite it being three years since she was diagnosed with MS, while filming the final season of Dead To Me, Applegate has not found peace with her disease.

“I’m still fucking pissed off,” she said. “I can’t believe it’s going to be three years since diagnosis in June and I’m still sitting here like, ‘boohoo, woe is me,’ but I’m still mad about it.”