Abstract / Summary
Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdown measures profoundly disrupted everyday life, generating experiences of confinement, uncertainty, and social disconnection. However, less attention has been paid to understanding how these experiences are retrospectively remembered and integrated into autobiographical memory. This study adopts an interpretative phenomenological approach to examine how individuals narrate and reinterpret their lockdown experiences over time, based on eleven in-depth interviews conducted in Bangalore, India. The findings show that lockdown memories are not direct recollections but are actively reconstructed through processes of reflection and meaning-making. Participants’ narratives reveal how experiences of disruption are integrated with adaptation, relational care, and ethical reflection. With this process, the study introduces the concept of lockstalgia as a form of reflective nostalgia through which individuals reinterpret crisis experiences with both critical awareness and appreciation. The study highlights how collective disruptions become meaningful through narrative reconstruction.