Many people have and will continue to condemn me personally for my tremendous but unexceptional student debt, and the ways in which it has made the recession’s effects linger for my family. I’ve spent quite a lot of time in the past decade accepting this blame. The recession may have compounded my family’s economic insecurity, but I also made the conscious decision to take out loans for a college I couldn’t afford in order to become a journalist, a profession with minimal financial returns. The amount of debt I owe in student loans — about $100,000 — is more than I make in a given year. I am ashamed and embarrassed by this, but as I grow older, I think it is time that those profiting from this country’s broken economic system share some of my guilt.

Because of the loans’ disgracefully high interest rates, my family and I have paid more or less the equivalent of my debt itself in the years since I graduated, making monthly payments in good faith — even in times of unemployment and extreme duress — to lenders like Citigroup, a bank that was among the largest recipients of federal bailout money in 2008 and that eventually sold off my debt to other lenders. This ruinous struggle has been essentially meaningless: I now owe more than what I started out owing, not unlike my parents with their mortgage.

For so many people, the frustration over the recession has not receded — it’s only been replaced by the fear of a more immediately upsetting present, though much of the country’s current situation can be traced back to the unresolved anger of 2008. Still, our culture is now being forced to reckon with a level of near nostalgia for the crisis, as if its misery has passed, ignoring the fact that so many families routed by the recession, like my own, have for the most part not recovered, at least not fully. In an interview in August, Barney Frank, the former chairman of the House Financial Services Committee and a co-sponsor of the Dodd-Frank Act, which revised financial regulations after the crisis, looked back almost wistfully on his regrets from that time. Mr. Frank, who is now on the board of Signature Bank, put it plainly: “We did not do enough to help stave off foreclosure for some of the innocent victims of all this.”

It’s an awfully nice thought, but I wonder where this realization was 10 years ago, when it would have meant something. Being forced to witness this halfhearted apology tour among high-ranking officials is another prominent feature of having grown up during the crisis, one that brings me back to a different scene from 2009, which I tend to revisit a great deal.