I laugh when people look at my CV and think my career was a careful path to becoming a cabinet minister. As if. From where I stood, it felt like my journey was full of twists, turns and unexpected detours. Young people often try to map out their careers and personal lives early on, but real life doesn’t work that way. That doesn’t mean you won’t get to where you want to go. It’s easy to say, but don’t let other people make you second-guess your choices because you think you’ll disappoint them. It’s your life.

I’ve seen this happen with so many other strong women, too. It’s as though we are expected to sit at the table, but not ask for much. There is this constant, invisible pressure to tone it down. This dynamic […] made me second-guess myself: “Am I speaking up too much? Am I being too forceful?” But I knew that when I did speak up, it was because I had something to say. Not because I enjoyed hearing my own voice.

Looking back, I have serious doubts about both the pipeline and our conciliatory approach to the oilsands. After all, the oil sector didn’t meet us halfway—or any- where close. Emissions kept rising. Promises to act were broken. Companies returned record profits to shareholders—many outside Canada—while demanding more subsidies at home.

The truth is, there’s no winning when you’re caught between regions, industries, and ideologies—especially on an issue as complex and existential as climate change.

But it’s also true that while politicians fight and make compromises, the climate crisis continues to get worse.

Unlike my mom’s generation, girls my age grew up being told we could have it all, but we needed to do all the right things in a way that was acceptable to others. And God knows what having it all even meant. At that point, all I wanted to do was be myself.

Who was representing the voices of those women who were killed in Montreal or the far too many women who would be killed by their partners in the future? I remember thinking that there needed to be more women in that chamber holding the government to account. And that maybe one of them should be me.

My interest in party politics began four years earlier—in January 2006, to be exact—when the Conservatives won a minority government with Stephen Harper as prime minister. I loathed everything he and the Conservative Party stood for: an economy tilted in favour of big business rather than workers; a move away from Canada’s role in the world being focused on multilateralism and peacekeeping to one much more aligned with President George W. Bush, the war on terror and climate denial. If I have anyone to thank for convincing me to enter politics, it’s Stephen Harper.

With growing security concerns, I was starting to feel like I’d become almost a prisoner in my own home. But I love dancing and fortunately for me, Ottawa’s legendary pinball and perogies place, House of TARG, has 80s and 90s nights, once a month on Fridays. At one point I decided I had to go with my girlfriends. It was time to live it up like I used to before politics, starting with the local dances in high school.

I’m a big New Order fan, but I’ll dance to almost anything fun that was played when I was in high school and university: U2, Green Day, Madonna, Eurythmics, The English Beat. People recognized me, but no one hassled me. Blowing off steam doesn't make you a worse politician—it made me a better one. If we want normal humans in politics, we can’t set impossible standards. Just ask the former Finnish prime minister, Sanna Marin

I’m sorry guys. It’s over. I’m not letting this one go.

I said this to my team in September 2017 as we sat in the overcrowded lobby of our nondescript midtown New York hotel after a long day at the United Nations.

I had looked at my phone and saw that my Twitter feed had exploded. I scrolled through and quickly figured out why. A former Conservative minister and current MP, Gerry Ritz, had taken a shot at me online by referring to me as Climate Barbie.

It wasn’t the first time I’d heard that insult or much worse. There was an active campaign against me led by right-wing rage-farming outlets and amplified by their followers that started basically the moment I was sworn in.

Being called Climate Barbie might not seem so bad especially after the blockbuster Barbie movie, where director Greta Gerwig helped recast Barbie in a feminist light. But this was way before that, and I certainly didn’t appreciate being called a Barbie. I never liked or played with Barbies, and I didn’t look or act like a Barbie.

I said this to my team all the time. Climate isn’t just an environmental thing. It’s an economy, justice, national security, jobs, Indigenous, innovation, gender, health, infrastructure thing!

They made me a mug.