A few years back — I think I was covering an inauguration, maybe, or some other high-security event — I found myself in a position I had not been in more than 20 years of reporting: alone in the Capitol Rotunda.

It was early morning, and the sunlight streamed in from the high windows like a kiss. I was all bundled up from the cold, and I couldn’t see a Capitol police officer anywhere. It struck me as a weird little miracle: me, alone in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol. I wasn’t sure what to do with the moment. So I danced.

It’s entirely possible that somewhere there is archived security footage of me, a chubby middle-aged woman, doing her weird version of a Charlie Brown shuffle in the middle of the symbol of democracy, clad in a giant, practical-but-ugly red parka.

But I danced that day because I had spent more than 20 years feeling like I was living a life I was unworthy of, receiving a fortune I had not earned.

When I was young, I wanted more than anything to write for newspapers. I read this columnist, Mike Royko, and it seemed like he had a great life, going to bars and talking to people and writing it down. Taking the piss out of the powerful and writing about people no one else really looked at. To 11-year-old me, it seemed like the most fantastic job in the world.

I’d read the Sidney Daily News every day, and the Columbus Dispatch or Dayton Daily News on the weekend, and I thought, man. If I could get paid to write stuff and put it in a newspaper? Fantastic.

If I could write for Columbus or Dayton? It was a dream that I couldn’t envision ever being worthy of.

And then I did it. I got jobs for both of those papers, as their Washington reporter. I got to talk to people and write it down. I talked to some people I agreed with and some people I didn’t agree with, but it didn’t matter. What I thought never mattered. I was writing because I wanted people to see them, to get a glimpse into disparate points of view.

I never felt like I deserved it, never felt like I was worthy of it. When I first got to D.C., I was terrified to ask a question at a news conference. Everyone around me seemed smarter and more aggressive. I didn’t want to look stupid. I felt like there’d been a mistake somewhere and someone better deserved my job.

When I reported on Sept. 11, I felt unworthy of the weight of history. I knew that the things I saw and wrote would be some part of the record, even if a minor one. I felt it was important to report on what happened, but also how it felt.

When a man called to tell me about his grandfather’s experience attending a Christmas Eve Mass in a cave in Maastricht, Netherlands, during the Battle of the Bulge, I spent hours trying to find out about every person who attended that Mass. I talked to their children and grandchildren. I talked to the few survivors left, including the grandfather. I pored through historical records.

And then I went back to that Rotunda, walking around it for hours, pausing to sit next to the statue of Dwight D. Eisenhower, trying to think of a way I could honor what those scared, lonely young men went through that night.

I still don’t feel worthy of that story. But when the grandfather died a few years later, his family had it framed and displayed at his funeral. I don’t feel worthy of that, either — but, my God, am I proud.

A few days after Jan. 6, 2021, I went back to the Capitol. I walked first to the hallway where Officer Eugene Goodman led a mob on the Senate side, provoking them into chasing him in order to keep the senators safe. I have spent hours of my life in that hallway, sitting on the benches, playing Sudoku on my phone or scrolling Twitter, waiting for senators.

Then I walked through the Rotunda toward the House. It was dark and empty, save a few guardsmen milling about.

Finally, I stopped at the elevator near the House Press Gallery not far from where Ashli Babbitt was shot and killed trying to enter a space where reporters could, pre-pandemic, pass notes in to lawmakers to ask them to come out and talk. I have sat in that hallway too, for hours, staring at Nicholas Longworth’s portrait, waiting for a vote to end, planning the supper I’d make for my family in my head. Now I knew my thoughts would always be a little darker when I sat in that space.

It’s been five years. We are still so divided. And the lessons we have learned, if any, have depended, largely, on what our political leanings are. In some ways now, it felt like that day — that day when the Capitol was cloaked in smoke, when my colleagues ran for their lives, when things felt irrevocably broken — was the first chapter of a book that drags on, painfully, to this day.

So I still cling to the memory of that morning, years before, when I was alone in the Rotunda.

It was so quiet there. I walked over the spot in the center of the room where Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy’s caskets once lay in state, and the history and the symbolism suddenly felt so powerful that it could’ve brought me to my knees.

It felt that morning something like a church, something near holy, and for a few brief minutes I had it all to myself. That beautiful place. That symbol of something so much bigger than any one politician could ever be. Something so much bigger than what any one of us could ever be.

I felt like a speck in democracy, in the long, messy story that this country tells. But being a speck was so much better than not being part of this beautiful, fragile experiment at all.

Jessica Wehrman is managing editor for politics and leadership at CQ Roll Call.