Editor’s Note: This is a recurring series of excerpts from the book, Waiting for Change. To purchase the book, please visit Amazon.com.

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As academics, reporters, or researchers, we often avoid messy “feelings” as to avoid coloring their reporting. “Feelings” are messy, fuzzy, and inconsistent. How do you quantify the depth of “feeling” involved in living through years of unemployment? How do you put that into context? Which was worse? Losing your home? Or the dissolution of your marriage due to the financial stress you experienced? The researcher’s perspective in this particular type of work, however, is acceptable – but not easily categorized or quantified. But it’s not the kind of research that typically yields easy sound bites, and can be easily refuted as “just one person’s experience” or “an exception.”

But we should remember that history isn’t solely a bunch of statistics and dates on a timeline. The fundamental basis for history is that it IS a STORY. Stories have characters. Stories reveal motivations. Stories can find resolution in the oddest of ways. Some stories go unresolved, plagued with lingering issues that revisit the characters again, and again, and again. And sadly, some stories never find the just and happy ending we might wish for.

So the story of a nation – the facts and figures and events of the day – then needs to be interwoven with the events of what life was like, even if for only one person – to be able to paint a more holistic, meaningful picture of what this monumental turning in America has been like.

Perhaps none of that matters though. In the end, perhaps the most important reason to document this experience is so that in 15, 20, or even 30 years from now, my own children will understand how painful life was during a time when they could not possibly comprehend the mind-numbing professional rejection. Perhaps it can serve as a time capsule to document the gut-wrenching sorrow of destroyed lives. Maybe such a recording of one history, even if it is only mine, can share with them a raw example of loneliness while trying to survive and recover during The Great Recession.

This book, then, centers on five key areas of the human experience – housing, sustenance, employment, children, and our social support systems. Certainly other topics could have become the focus of other chapters as well. This writing, then, attempts to explore how these areas of one’s life can be so drastically impacted – irrevocably altered – by job loss and the continuing drag of the Great Recession we’ve all experienced in a myriad of different ways.

This is a story seen across the country. It’s not a story that’s just been merely ripped from the headlines.

It’s a story that’s happening to thousands of people every day. It’s not just a study of news stories or statistics.

It’s a story of interaction and reaction to the day’s events, providing context and color for the time. It’s not just a series of tips for survival.

It’s a story that would otherwise just be a footnote to the statistics reported on the 6 o’clock news.

This story just happens to be mine.