“We can choose to wake up and grumble all day and be bitter and angry and judge others and find satisfaction in others doing bad instead of good. Or we can we wake up with optimism and love and say, ‘Just what is this beautiful day going to bring me?’”
“The first thing that happens to someone with a mental illness, in the throes of it, is that they lose all their self-esteem. They don’t think they fit in.”
“You can’t fix yourself out of a mental health issue. You can’t wake up and say, ‘Today I’m not being depressed!’ It’s a process to get well, but there is recovery.”
“Bad choices make good stories.”
“The problem with mental illness, as opposed to physical illness, is that it involves wrong thinking or impaired insight. You’re not thinking correctly.”
“A truly empowered woman turns her values into verbs. She understands what she values most, and she takes steps to bring that value to life.”
“I’ve had so many rich, rich, beautiful things happen to me in my life because I do have energy, and I do reach out, and I stretch my eyes.”
“The label ‘wife of the prime minister’ is like a giant signboard pointing at my head from a Monty Python sketch. But I am not Mrs. Prime Minister. I’m a human being.”
“I am a free spirit that must survive in a free world.”
“I know what it’s like to feel marginalized and defeated and humiliated by suffering from a mental illness.”
“I remember, after my first postpartum depression, I didn’t know what had happened to me. I was stuck in this gray depression where I just wanted to retreat and pull the covers over my head and weep. My mother and I, we went to a psychiatrist, and he just patted me on the head and told me I had baby blues, which was not helpful, obviously.”
“Who am I – Canada’s Rodney Dangerfield? I get no respect.”
“At 65, most of us still have a lot to give and a lot to contribute.”
“I have learned one thing: the only thing you can change about your husband is the way he dresses.”
“Everywhere I go, particularly when there’s people who know me or recognize me, I get the warmest hugs and happiest sighs full of hope and full of relief.”
“I am not a weirdo, a wacko, or an eccentric for wanting to do good, honest work on a day-to-day basis.”
“I certainly don’t have all the answers, but I know this to be true: we have a great degree of control over what happens to us in the last third of our lives.”
“Canadians know me so well – I am part of Canada’s collective memory – and my fame would get people through the door who would not otherwise be interesting in talking about mental health.”
“If you rely completely on protocol, you can become a robot.”
“Growing up in Vancouver in the 1950s, I was often capricious and temperamental, quick to laugh, even quicker to feel despair, prone to flailing my arms, pouting and crying when things didn’t go my way, or I thought something was unfair, or I was bullied by my sisters.”
“I was a quicksilver girl who saw every leaf on every tree. For me, there was no middle ground between sinking and flying, and once I was into my early adult years, my roller coaster got wilder and faster: I seemed to rise and fall with the same reckless velocity.”
“I wince at some of the things I did as the young wife of Canada’s fifteenth prime minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau.”
“Simply put, women should prepare in their 50s for the rest of their lives.”
“Our youth-oriented society does not have a clearly defined place for the older woman.”
“I turned 65 and thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m a senior. How did this happen?’”
“I’m an old hippie who lives in the now. I seldom look forward, but we have to.”
“I was a late bloomer on the career front.”
“I don’t think I’m marriage material, to tell you the truth. I’d be a bad choice. But I’d be darling at being a girlfriend.”
“I just want to find my individuality.”
“I’ve had enough of being public property.”
“I don’t care about the respect of the press or the public or anybody. Whose respect every day I’m trying to garner is the respect of my children and my grandchildren and my friends, the people I work with.”
“I have worked hard to become happy. It was a real struggle.”
“I miss being exposed to the leading thinkers of the world.”
“I know it will blow minds, but I plan on finding an apartment in New York. I’ll commute to Ottawa, so I can still be Pierre Trudeau’s wife and the mother of our three children – but I also want to be a working photographer.”
“There’s nothing antifeminist about showing a lovely body; it’s part of the person you are.”
“I’ve never been one to celebrate anniversaries.”
“I have studied Freud and that kind of thing. I just never thought I would need it.”
“I prepared myself for my marriage to Pierre Trudeau, but I didn’t prepare myself for marriage to the prime minister.”
“I don’t paint, and I can’t draw, but I see things, I think, quite well, and I love being able to freeze things with the camera, particularly the children. Then I discovered with the camera that you can tell a whole story with just freezing a moment in reality. I find it a very good way, a very satisfying feeling.”
“I’m pretty much an out-front, straightforward chick, and I get a bit confused by expectations.”
“Politics is an ugly and thankless role.”
“I tried during the 1974 campaign to show my husband not as the aloof intellectual people think he is, but the warm, passionate man I know. But the day after the election – after I’d worked so hard – I was put back on the shelf. I was devastated.”
“I can’t be a rose in any man’s lapel.”
“Everyone wants a loving, equal relationship.”
“I tend to keep the press at a distance, you know, and I don’t really react to what they say. I react to what I feel more.”
“I feel very confident and positive about my life.”
“I’m no political pundit.”
“Suddenly I turned 65 and realized, ‘Oh my goodness, I’m old.’ I think it was when I got into the movie theatres cheaper.”
“For me, because I’m a mental health advocate, I want everyone to be the healthiest they can be.”
“Don’t feel badly when you take off work to go for a run, to go for a walk; don’t feel badly to take time to play with your children, to be part of their lives. Work is important, but you can’t work at your best unless you’re a whole person.”
“When you’re mentally ill, sometimes you’re so self-involved that you forget how much you’re hurting all the people around you who love you so much, because you don’t understand that you’ve got to get help.”
“I had to divorce my husband, the prime minister. I found it terribly overwhelming.”
“I don’t think Pierre Trudeau knew how to be a husband. I couldn’t stay in that marriage.”
“I have five of the most beautiful children.”
“I love the life I’ve had.”
“I strongly believe that privacy is one of the biggest luxuries one can have in life – to have your own private world and not be invaded by the outside.”
“I live with being bipolar, but it doesn’t define me anymore.”
“The main thing that triggered my depression was my isolation that was imposed on me by becoming the wife of the prime minister, and leaving my home, my family. I was young, very young, and very naive and very hopeful and enthusiastic about my wonderful new life, but it was the loneliness and the lack of being able to properly relate to people.”
“I can only ask people to be tolerant of the fact that the… pressures of wives of politicians is very, very strong.”
“Mania is the most destructive of the forces. Everybody around you will tell you you’re in trouble, and you can’t hear what they are saying.”
“We don’t help people mourn in our society.”
“Every day is wonderful for me.”
“My life for so many years was a reality show.”
“I have some great stories. But I am also very human, and I suffered an awful lot.”
“I have had quite the grand, interesting life.”
“I was so surprised, astonished, when I lost my mind, because I didn’t think that I ever would. I assumed I would always be just fine.”
“You need community support. You’re pretty defeated when you’re laid low with a mental illness. It’s a frightening place to be, and to get up and be able to stand and to move forward and to start functioning again, you need so much support. You need to feel you’re not alone.”
“I had no idea there was such a thin line between sanity and insanity. I got pushed right to the edge by tragedy in my life, and I couldn’t stand up; I couldn’t recover.”
“I was pregnant and nursing most of the years I was at 24 Sussex. I was ill-prepared and hardly even knew my husband, let alone how I was supposed to fit into this world that was very alien to me.”
“My honesty about mental illness has helped open a door for real conversation, and I think Justin wants to continue that conversation. He has put no restrictions on me. His father couldn’t. Why should he try?”
“I didn’t even like Mick Jagger.”
“Do you know what prepares you for the mental hospital? Being a prime minister’s wife.”
“I’ve had such an exciting life.”
“I think we can choose to be happy in our lives.”
“I thought of 24 Sussex Drive as the crown jewel of the federal penitentiary system.”
“I tried to be a good wife, but I was lost in my gilded cage.”
“I was a bit of a mother hen at Studio 54.”
“The best luxury in the world isn’t a diamond ring or a nice house – well, it could be – but it’s privacy.”
“I’m not really part of the Internet world, my age a factor in that and a lack of interest in sharing with so many, so little, so much, so often.”
“I shouldn’t say it, but I found that the French can be the most arrogant people in the world if they want to be.”
“You have got to give. There is no other reason to be on the planet.”
“I know, as a mother, it hurts you very much to see your children suffer.”
“When we have healthy children, we have a healthy community. They can learn. They can play. They can be part of the future. They can help you all do very well and prosper instead of suffering.”
“With my children, balance was everything: being not just a workaholic, not only studying but taking time to renew and restore yourself and taking time to pay attention to your brain health and not assume, as we all do, that our brains are perfect.”
“I think our jobs as parents is to raise our children with empathy – to figure out who this little character is, almost from birth, and then guide them to fulfill their best potential.”
“The secret is to nip any mental disorder in the bud. As soon as you’re not feeling yourself, reach out and get some help because you can quickly get better. If you get stuck in it, it’s so hard to get out.”
“I try to build up people, not break them down, and in politics, it seems now the game is breaking down your opponents.”
“I have a bigger, peaceful view of life than aggressively breaking down other people.”
“I tell the children I want everyone to love the life that they’re in, to be who they are… and make it the best life they can.”
“Pierre was an extraordinary teacher – he really was one of the best, and he raised the boys so, so well: to have a global view, to have compassion, to be humanitarians, to really be concerned about alleviating suffering.”
“Being bipolar is a huge exaggeration of your emotions. You can be pretty high and also terribly low, so I’ve been through it all.”
“I have a lot of lovely things in my life that I wasn’t able to have before I got healed from my imbalanced life.”
“Depression is 80 per cent of my condition, and 10 per cent is mania, and 10 per cent is what we call normal. I say that must be when I am buying groceries. Or vacuuming.”
“There was imbalance with my first husband just by the given of our 29-year age difference and the difficulty of me being this unformed, enthusiastic young woman and he already completely in place being the leader of the country.”
“I think I devoted my life to Pierre Trudeau and our beautiful children.”
“Oh, am I a feminist? I usually say that I was an accidental feminist. Really, I was just being me.”
“Every life is extraordinary.”
“My life has been extreme. Most people will not have the experience I’ve had. But the things that changed me, really changed me, they happen to everyone.”
“I’d studied acting in New York when I left Pierre – that was the big thing that I did. I worked very hard at it, actually.”
Leave a Reply