Twenty-one years. The closer I get to the 40, the less that feels like a big number.

And so I'll say that it was just 21 years ago that I sat down to write what my high school called “senior prophecies,” forecasts 12th graders wrote to signal where they hoped to be in the future.

The granddaughter of a local politician who planned at the time to study political science in college, there was a hint of hopefulness to mine: I said I would be giving my acceptance speech as the first female president of the United States.

By and large, it was a joke.

I was a woman growing up in a nation that had already gone 210 years without a single person who looked like me in the White House.

Did I really expect that to change?

I was young and full of optimism.

I also realized my chances were slim. My joke was tinged with self-deprecation and a hint of bitterness. I was embarking on a journey into a world that had made amply clear my dreams were just that — dreams.

The reality was that I was up against hundreds of years of history.

Saturday morning, as the news that Joe Biden had won Pennsylvania and thus the presidential election sunk in, another realization hit me.

Kamala Harris was our vice president. A woman was our vice president. A woman was a heartbeat away from the presidency.

For the first time. The first time in 231 years, someone who looks like me, someone who looks like my daughter will hold the second highest office in the land.

This is an easy thing to overlook when it has been a fact for you since you were born. If you were born male in America, you were born into a nation where the president has always looked like you, where you never had to make self-deprecating jokes about being the very first in more than 200 years to accomplish something.

It's easy too to overlook this watershed moment if she wasn't your pick for VP. The cloud of upset, even anger, may be too dark to see through.

But last week a ceiling was shattered, glass falling all around us.

And in three year's time, when my own daughter sits down to write her senior prophecy, I can only hope she won't have to wait 21 years to feel like it was more than just a pipe dream.