For the first time, she allowed the myth of herself to crack in public. Gone was the polished certainty of a candidate, the rehearsed defiance of a perennial survivor. Instead, she described what it meant to be both indispensable and despised, to carry other people’s projections until they felt like chains. The speech was less confession than inventory: moments of triumph set against years of vilification, private doubts folded into public resolve.

She did not ask for sympathy or rewrite the past as misunderstood heroism. She simply named the cost and refused to pretend it had been painless. In doing so, she turned the spotlight away from her own endurance and toward those who would come next. The implied warning was clear: the work remains, but so does the backlash. If she is stepping back, it is not to escape the fight, but to insist that it cannot depend on a single, battered figure forever.