(IN THESE TIMES) — The woman on the platform seems happy. She’s an ordinary woman, well-dressed but not ostentatiously so, pretty but not playing it up, heading gracefully into late middle age. Her voice is low and calm; her tone is gracious. She smiles frequently as she speaks, compliments the reporters surrounding her and tells them how good it’s been to work with them, with what reads as genuine affection.

“I think after twenty years–and it will be twenty years–of being on the high wire of American politics, and all of the challenges that come with that,” she says, “It would probably be a good idea to just find out how tired I am.”

That gets a laugh, and she laughs with it. If you take Hillary Clinton moment by moment–if you take her, for example, at this moment on January 26, as she announces that she step down from her position as the Secretary of State when the president’s terms ends–it’s hard to imagine that she’s spent the last two decades of her life as one of the most hated women in America. And if you take her on the whole, the void left by her promised departure from American politics is nearly impossible to comprehend.

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