Picture it: Washington, DC, 1993. Bill Clinton's presidential inauguration. An 11-year-old girl freezing in the January wind, huddled with her sisters and her mom to stay warm, waiting, along with her family members, to glimpse the person they had braved the Inauguration-Day throng to see. It was the same person whose face adorned pins they had purchased and dutifully stuck to their winter coats to commemorate the occasion. The girls and their mother never did catch even a passing glance of the person — they were too short and the crowd was too thick — but they heard the voice. Her voice. The voice, my friends, belonged to Hillary Clinton. The little girl was me.

Fast forward 15 years (yikes!), and that little girl, as much as it pains her to admit it, is now a grown-ass woman. She no longer looks at Hillary Clinton, for a laundry list of reasons, with quite the same adulation. And that pains her, too, because there is still so much of Hillary Clinton that is great. And even though Clinton has lowered herself in the estimation of many who once admired her, she has still accomplished something that will, hopefully, change what it means to be a woman in this country and open doors that were once closed, locked, and dead-bolted. Her candidacy has highlighted the perniciousness of sexism in this country, and one could write a book about her resilience in the face of this particular adversity. For all that there is about which to be disappointed in Hillary Clinton — and there's a lot, at least for that woman who once froze her ass off while sporting a Hillary Clinton pin 15 years ago — there are many major accomplishment to applaud. She's out of the race, having endorsed Barack Obama and implored her supporters to do the same at an event in DC over the weekend. Yes, she's out of the race, but she's definitely made her mark.