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I’ve been interested in politics for as long as I can remember. At eight, I devoured the encyclopedia entries on the presidents. At nine, I volunteered on my first political campaign. But it wasn’t until 2004 that I learned that I could also be inspired by politics.

I remember sitting on the floor of my bedroom glued to CSPAN’s coverage of the proceedings at the Democratic convention in Boston. That night the country would be introduced to a little-known Illinois state senator named Barack Obama. I had grown up reading the rhetoric of the towering giants, the soaring pros of past presidents who spoke to conquering fear and our better angels. But in our contemporary politics, our politicians and their words felt as ordinary as our politics and as insubstantial as our progress. For me, that is, until Barack Obama.

He didn’t speak with the trite clichés of the 90s. He spoke with the weight of history, a depth and profoundness reserved for the figures I read about in the history books.

Reflecting on the last twelve years, it’s impossible to overstate the significance of Barack Obama for me. He’s been the most formative political figure of my life, partly because his rise coincided so perfectly with my own political and personal awakening. My friends and I often sit around and talk about how lucky we were to be seventeen and eighteen during his 2008 campaign. The hope and excitement were tangible. I honestly can’t imagine a better election to come of age during.

I remember traveling five hours with friends to attend his first rally in early 2007, even before he officially launched his campaign, at George Mason University. In early 2008, my friends and I woke up extra early and waited in line for hours to get front row spots at his primary rally in Wilmington, Delaware. During his inaugural whistle-stop tour in January of 2009, he stopped in Wilmington to pick up his Vice President-elect and speak. My mom and I were in the front row there, too. And two days later, we traveled down to Washington to witness the inauguration of our nation’s first Black president.

Like many in my generation, he was the first person I ever voted for, something that I will always consider a privilege to have been able to do.

As a college student in Washington, DC studying politics, I went with friends to the Senate and watched in person as each senator stood at their desk to vote, one-by-one, on the Affordable Care Act, the most significant piece of progressive legislation in half a century.

At each step – at seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, and twenty – I learned that history wasn’t just for the textbooks. We were watching it unfold in real-time in the real world.

Over the last eight years, we’ve witnessed history. We saw a President, against all odds, rescue our economy from the worst recession since the Great Depression and save the auto industry. He passed the most significant Wall Street reform package in several generations, normalized relations with Cuba after decades, put in place potentially planet-saving measures to curb climate change, issued the most significant improvement to overtime protections since the 70s, signed the largest expansion of access to health care since the 1960s, and so much more.

As I said at the Democratic convention, in 2012, when I came out as transgender, I feared that my dreams and my identity were mutually exclusive. I worried that my professional career was over and that the heart of this country was not big enough to love people like me.

But just three months after coming out, I had the chance to intern at the White House for this president. Just three months after thinking that my professional life was finished, the Obama Administration invited me in and showed me that I was seen, I was valued, and that our politics and this country had a place for me, too; that I could walk the halls of the White House as my authentic self as an equal surrounded by other interns and young staffers who believed that, together, we could help build a more perfect union.

As a trans person and an LGBTQ advocate, I witnessed a president who fostered unprecedented progress for LGBTQ people, from the single-largest expansion of LGBTQ workplace protections in history with a ban on discrimination by federal contractors to the repeal of DADT and the ban on openly trans service-members. His administration stood up for trans people under siege by their own state governments and, as a moral and political figure, he presided over marriage equality becoming the law of the land nationwide.

I’ll never forget the night of that ruling. As with so many other moments during this president’s career, I met up with friends. With joy and the knowledge that we were witnessing history, we made our way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to see the White House, the symbol of our country, lit up like the rainbow.

I couldn’t stop thinking about LGBTQ young people across the country who went to sleep that night with just a little more hope. Young people who have no allies to stand up for them in their families or schools or towns, but who saw their identities – their lives – celebrated by the leader of the free world and who got the message loud and clear: you are seen, you are valued, and this country has a place for you, too.

I know it sounds like I’ve guzzled the Kool-Aid. And perhaps I have. I know there have been failures and plenty of things have and will be written about them. They should be. There have been instances when the change we sought either didn’t happen, was not enough, or it took too long.

But as his term comes to a close, and as we face the prospect of the antithesis of Barack Obama in that office, I don’t want to lose the way *this* Administration made me feel. I don’t want to forget that even in the hate and pettiness of the incoming presidency, we can still hope and fight for something better – much better – because we’ve seen it.

It’s been more than twelve years since we first met Barack Obama. In the speech that eventually launched him to the White House, he inspired many in my generation to believe in hope. He wasn’t talking about “blind optimism.” He was “talking about something more substantial. It's the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs; the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores […] the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too.”

After twelve years, he has built an America that has a place for so many others, too.

It’s still not perfect. Far from it. The results of the last election reinforce that. But we have witnessed history and we will fight like hell to preserve the presidency and progress that came with it. And, today, I’m just as inspired as I have ever been by the man we’ve been lucky enough to call our President for the last eight years.