We're often told that we should avoid taking negative encounters with strangers too personally because we don't know what each other is going through, and that seems just as true for those in the public eye as it is for the people we meet on the street.
For instance, the cases of Chadwick Boseman and Norm Macdonald remind us that people can struggle with a scary and disheartening illness for years with almost nobody knowing about it.
And as we can learn from Selma Blair and Fran Drescher, that journey gets even harder if much of it is spent not even knowing what you're suffering from.
But when public figures do share that information with the world, their journeys happen with the support of their fans and what they've been going through can provide a lot of context for the milestones they hit along the way.
