It didn’t matter that they knew it was coming. Elizabeth Warren suspending her presidential campaign on Thursday still elicited a visceral, deeply emotional response from her female supporters. In a word that began to pop up all over my Twitter feed, Warren’s exit, after a disappointing Super Tuesday finish, felt personal.

“This is so heartbreaking, and it feels so damn personal,” feminist journalist Jill Filipovic tweeted. “It hurts that we probably won’t see a woman president in my lifetime because people will find a mutable metric to vote for literally anyone but a deeply qualified woman with a clearly articulated vision for change,” added author Roxane Gay. “Elizabeth Warren’s plight feels personal because IT IS personal,” Backstage writer Casey Mink wrote.

Critics can try to dismiss and deny it as rah-rah, millennial-pink feminism—although I’d say today is really not the day—but the feeling is real and alive in so many of us, not just as individuals but as a collective: that Warren’s loss is an indictment of us too. Is it a bit of projection? Sure, but a certain kind of woman, however loftily, sees herself in Warren: smart and studious, ambitious and outspoken, always harboring a pipe dream, perhaps following their own path and not the societally expected one. I think of Warren, in a definite break from her generation and her mother (whose chief concern was for Warren to get married and be a mom), going to college and law school, being elected to the Senate, and joining the presidential race. It’s a lot to be proud of, but it no longer feels like enough.

Warren was often called professorial as a supposed burn, but any little girl who lived to win the spelling bee and the math bee, who ran for class president, who wanted all the gold stars and Brownie badges and grew up with her nose in a Baby-Sitters Club book recognizes these Tracy Flickian sensibilities. Striving is part of your identity and the heart of you: being someone with big goals, someone who tries, someone who wants to win. If you’re lucky, you’re encouraged in these pursuits by parents and guardians, teachers or coaches. But then you grow up and you see women—plural—who you humbly consider to be something like yourself consistently told that they cannot be president. And you wonder about the disconnect.