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?'
Margaret Trudeau
If you rely completely on protocol, you can become a robot.
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.
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.
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 tried to be a good wife, but I was lost in my gilded cage.
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 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 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 didn't even like Mick Jagger.
I just want to find my individuality.
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 had to divorce my husband, the prime minister. I found it terribly overwhelming.
Politics is an ugly and thankless role.
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.
I wince at some of the things I did as the young wife of Canada's fifteenth prime minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau.
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.
Everyone wants a loving, equal relationship.
I'm pretty much an out-front, straightforward chick, and I get a bit confused by expectations.
I'm no political pundit.
I can't be a rose in any man's lapel.
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.
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.
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.
The best luxury in the world isn't a diamond ring or a nice house - well, it could be - but it's privacy.
I was a bit of a mother hen at Studio 54.
I try to build up people, not break them down, and in politics, it seems now the game is breaking down your opponents.
I've never been one to celebrate anniversaries.
I am a free spirit that must survive in a free world.
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.
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 live with being bipolar, but it doesn't define me anymore.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
At 65, most of us still have a lot to give and a lot to contribute.
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.
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 have learned one thing: the only thing you can change about your husband is the way he dresses.
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 am not a weirdo, a wacko, or an eccentric for wanting to do good, honest work on a day-to-day basis.
I've had enough of being public property.
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.
