Time & Perspective Quote by Margot Kidder

There is a particular kind of candor that only arrives once privacy is gone. Kidder frames her mental health not as a tidy redemption arc, but as a collision between denial and visibility: before, she could "sweep" episodes away, treating illness like mess you hide for company. The image is domestic, almost mundane, and thats the point. It captures how normalization works in reverse: we dont glamorize breakdowns; we minimize them, file them away, pretend theyre not structural.

Then comes the pivot: "everyone knew". Not enlightenment, not diagnosis, not a noble decision - exposure. The subtext is uncomfortable and honest: accountability sometimes begins as humiliation. For a celebrity, public knowledge can be punitive, but Kidder refuses the tabloid framing of scandal. She turns it into a forced break in the pattern of concealment, a moment when image management stops working and survival takes over.

"Hard work" does heavy lifting here. It rejects the myth of effortless recovery and the equally corrosive myth that treatment is just inspiration plus willpower. Work implies routine, relapse planning, boring consistency - the stuff that never makes a good headline. And "almost 10 years" is quietly radical: stability is measured in time, not in a single triumphant moment.

Context matters: Kidder lived through an era when womens mental illness was both pathologized and mocked, especially in Hollywood. Her phrasing insists on a third option: neither shame nor spectacle, just the ongoing labor of getting well.