“A year ago tonight, I thought I was about to walk into the room where our first female president would take the stage.

The energy was electric when my team and I arrived at the Javits Center in the early evening hours of Nov. 8. There was premature (and, in retrospect, completely unearned) celebratory chatter, and lots of female reporters excitedly greeting each other in the press area downstairs.

Of course, we all now know how that night ended. I did not see a woman elected president of the United States. Instead, as the hours crept by and it became increasingly clear that Hillary Clinton would not be our president, the air inside the Javits Center felt stifling. The sprawling glass ceiling went from symbolic to a cruel joke. Instead of talking to overjoyed grandmothers and teen girls as I thought I would be that night, I spent hours interviewing sobbing men and women as they clutched their tightly wound American flags and fled Clinton’s public block party.

2016 would not be the year the proverbial glass ceiling was shattered. As Jia Tolentino put it in December, we had “played ourselves” ― and badly.

It feels impossible that 365 days have passed since that one. Nov. 8, 2016 feels like yesterday yet also like a different plane of existence. I’m a far more exhausted, deadened-on-the-inside person now than I was on that day ― a more exhausted, deadened-on-the-inside woman with a far clearer vision of the country she lives in. The last year has been full of sobering self-reflection ― as a woman, as a white person, and as a member of the media.”