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Well-behaved women seldom make history.

—Laurel Thatcher Ulrich Making History

“I just want to show you this,” said David Muir, the young ABC News anchor, as he walked me to the window. “This is the crowd that’s waiting for you.”

It was late on Tuesday, June 7, 2016, the day of the final Democratic primaries. Muir and I were on the second floor of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, in a small room crowded with cameras, hot lights, and a TV crew making final arrangements for our interview. The window looked out onto a cavernous hangar that was packed with thousands of cheering people waving American flags and stomping their feet. In the middle stood an empty stage.

“Oh my gosh,” I said, clasping my hands to my heart. “Look at that!”

“It’s eight years ago to the day that you conceded. And tonight you will go out there for a very different reason,” Muir said.

I thought back to that painful day in 2008 when I stood in front of a much more somber crowd in the National Building Museum in Washington, and thanked my supporters for putting eighteen million cracks in the highest, hardest glass ceiling. Now here I was, closer than ever to shattering that ceiling once and for all.

“Is it sinking in?” he asked.

“This is sinking it in, I can tell you that,” I said, pointing to the crowd below. “It’s an overwhelming feeling, David, really.”

It had been a difficult week. Heck, it had been a difficult year. The primaries had gone on longer and been far more bruising than anyone expected. The delegate math hadn’t been in question since March, but Bernie had hung on to the bitter end, drawing blood wherever he could along the way. I somewhat understood why he did it; after all, I stayed in the race for as long as I could in 2008. But that race was much closer, and I endorsed Barack right after the last primary. On this day in New York, Bernie was still more than a month away from endorsing me.

I spent the previous days campaigning like crazy in California. Even if I had the nomination locked up, I wanted to win California. I wanted to close out the primaries with a burst of enthusiasm and head toward our convention in Philadelphia with the wind at my back. The polls looked good, but I was anxious. Too many times in this campaign I had felt like Charlie Brown with the football. There had been the squeaker in Iowa and surprise losses in Michigan and Indiana. This time I wasn’t going to leave anything to chance.

That Monday, I had raced all over Southern California, holding rallies, doing local TV and radio interviews, and trying to encourage as many of my supporters as possible to get out and vote. A little after 5:00 p.m., as we were driving to yet another rally at Long Beach City College, my phone started buzzing. The Associated Press had just sent out a breaking news alert. Its reporters had been canvassing superdelegates, the party leaders who join delegates selected in primaries and caucuses in choosing the nominee at the convention. According to the AP’s latest count, I had just hit the magic number of delegates needed to win. “Hillary Clinton Becomes the Democratic Party’s Presumptive Presidential Nominee,” it declared. I had to read it twice to believe it.

You might think this was good news. I’d won! But that’s not how I felt at all. I was focused entirely on the next day’s California primary, along with the contests in Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, New Jersey, and South Dakota. This news could very well depress turnout among my supporters. And I wanted to be able to walk out onstage Tuesday night and declare victory, not have it announced in an out-of-the-blue tweet from the Associated Press the day before. I told Huma and Greg Hale, an Arkansas farmer and event-production-and-visuals wizard whom I’ve known since he was four years old, that I imagined a sea of people waving small American flags as the backdrop, and they teased me about doing my own advance work. But I had been waiting for this moment for months, and I wanted it to be perfect.

We arrived at the college in Long Beach, and I went into a makeshift greenroom. It was part of a locker room and felt like a cage. I was annoyed and not sure what to say. What was the best way to acknowledge the news in my rally speech without making too big a deal of it? I wanted to just pretend it hadn’t happened, but that didn’t seem like a viable option. Nick, who with Huma was on the phone with the rest of the team in Brooklyn, suggested a formulation. “Why not say we’re on the brink of a historic moment?” That would have to do, I grumbled.

I also was unsatisfied with the draft for the victory speech I was supposed to deliver on Tuesday night. It didn’t feel right: too small, too political, not worthy of the moment. I felt the weight of expectations and history pressing down on me.

If the primaries were over, and I was the presumptive nominee, that meant I was now all that stood between Donald Trump and the White House. It would just be me and him, one-on-one, with stakes that couldn’t possibly be higher. Everyone would be counting on me. We absolutely had to win.

On top of all that, I was about to become the first woman ever nominated by a major party for President of the United States. That goal has been so elusive for so long. Now it was about to be real.

I’d been thinking about all the women who had marched, rallied, picketed, went to jail, and endured ridicule, harassment, and violence so that one day someone like me could come along and run for President. I thought about the brave women and men who gathered in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848 for the first great conference on women’s rights. Frederick Douglass, the African American social reformer and abolitionist, was there. He described his fellow participants as “few in numbers, moderate in resources, and very little known in the world. The most we had to connect us was a firm commitment that we were in the right and a firm faith that the right must ultimately prevail.”

Sixty-eight “ladies” and thirty-two “gentlemen” signed the Declaration of Sentiments, which asserted boldly, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men and women are created equal.” All men and women. The backlash was fierce. The Seneca Falls 100 were called dangerous fanatics. They were also dismissed as batty old maids—I’m not sure how one can be both, but apparently these activists were. One newspaper declared, “These rights for women would bring a monstrous injury to all mankind.” But those brave suffragettes never lost faith.

What could I say on Tuesday night that would be worthy of that legacy and the hope that millions were now investing in me?

For a long time, the campaign had been trying to figure out the best way to talk about the historic nature of my candidacy. There were brainstorming sessions in Brooklyn, as well as polls and focus groups. Many of our core supporters were very excited by the idea of finally breaking the glass ceiling. Celebrating that could help keep people energized and motivated in the general election. But some younger women didn’t see what the big deal was. And many undecided women in battleground states didn’t want to hear about it at all. Some were afraid that by leaning into the fact that I was a woman, my campaign would end up turning away men—a disheartening but all-too-real possibility. So that wasn’t much help.

I was torn. I wanted to be judged on what I did, not on what I represented or what people projected onto me. But I understood how much this breakthrough would mean to the country, especially to girls and boys who would see that there are no limits on what women can achieve. I wanted to honor that significance. I just didn’t know the best way to do it.