What follows is based on this article: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42087-025-00537-3
Overview
As mentioned in the previous entry, we are particularly interested in how crises appear and are experienced across people’s lives, and reading through Brickpaver’s - and indeed other - diaries opened a unique window into these processes. In the article, we started from two puzzles. First, the events that diarists might experience as crises or ruptures (we will get back to the definitions later) did not always align with what society labels a crisis. Second, these ruptures were rarely experienced as isolated events but often “resonated” with each other. We decided to write this paper based on Brickpaver’s diary because it contained ample examples of these two points. However, it should be said that while his story is unique, the patterns we observed were present in other diaries.
Meet Brickpaver
We still vividly remember our first visit with Brickpaver. We were still feeling somewhat dazed after two days on the seemingly endless American interstate but left our generic hotel to meet Brickpaver at his house. After five minutes on foot, we entered a neighbourhood with detached houses and the incessant presence of cars diminished. We spotted Brickpaver’s brightly coloured house from a distance and noticed a figure moving about on the front porch, camouflaged by a cocoon of trees and bushes. A quaint miniature gate, barely high enough to keep a toddler out, opened to a brick-paved path leading to a raised porch with Roman columns. Brickpaver met us at the stairs with a welcoming smile. He quickly invited us inside the house, about which we had already read so much. The interior was homely and antique, with yellow walls and custom-made panelling. Thick red patterned carpets covered much of the floor, and most of the furniture was made of dark wood. Chandeliers dangled from the ceiling and the strained-glass windows gave the living and dining rooms a cosy lighting. After some excellent home-cooked waffles with blueberries and a generous amount of syrup, Brickpaver gave us a tour of his house, including a listen to the phonographs he collects and restores, now displayed throughout his house. We eventually settled on his front porch – our preferred spot for the many conversations and interviews that followed over the next five days.
What are crises even?
If we look closer at the scientific literature as well as how people intuitively tend to think about crises, they are often described as temporary states of exception, in which what is considered normal breaks down and uncertainty rise. People and societies therefore seek to establish a new normality - to create a new world in the ashes of the old - or return to what is remembered as comfortable and familiar. Such definition builds on the idea that crises have a distinct “before” and an “after”, but when we look around the world today, this hardly seem to be the case. Millions live in chronic crisis, where crisis has become the norm and the prospect of bringing about a future different from the present is not plausible.
When crises no longer have a common form and instead come in many shapes or sizes, depending on whose perspective you take, we also have to acknowledge that no one size fits all. The ecological crisis is an excellent example, for the most privileged, the crisis can appear invisible or displaced, meaning happening either elsewhere on the globe or sometime in the future.
Crises can be many things
When focusing on when and how people experience crises, it quickly becomes apparent that even what constitute a crises depend on a wide range of factors. In order not to lose sight of people’s experiences, we distinguish between “crises”, as socially and politically designed events, from “ruptures”, as what is experienced as a significant disruption for people. Ruptures destabilise routines and expectations, making the future appear more unpredictable. They can happen in all realms of life and can be anticipated (such as relocating to a city across the country) or unanticipated (such as the attacks of 9/11). Ultimately, what becomes a rupture depend on the person and their unique circumstances, which explains why not all crises becomes ruptures for some. In these times of rupture, people often try to use different “resources” to make sense of the new situation. One example is how during the first weeks of COVID-19, a lot of people watched the movie Contagion (about a deadly pandemic) to familiarise themselves to an unfamiliar situation - after all, it was an unprecedented situation creating massive upheavals to most aspect of life.
Crises are bound together
When we read people’s life stories, we also noticed that crises and ruptures often resonated, by which we mean that past events sometimes mitigated or amplified current ones. We therefore refer to resonance when crises and ruptures connect. We suggest three different forms of resonances: (1) a temporal resonance, capturing when current experiences resonate with one or more of the past; (2), and embodied resonance, occurring when feelings previously experienced resonate forward into current ones; and (3), cumulative resonance, referring to the resonance between near-simultaneous ruptures or crisis. The examples below are from Brickpaver’s diary and the many conversations we had.
Temporal resonances
Seven days after his first diary mention of the COVID-19 pandemic, Brickpaver linked it to living through the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. While both crises were societal, gay men were disproportionally impacted by the latter, again demonstrating how societal crises are experienced very differently depending on whose perspective you take. In Brickpaver’s case, his past experiences were used to make sense of the present, particularly the “silence” from the policymakers in Washington – indicating a resonance through time. The following diary entry was written at the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic:
“Mid-March 2020: Compare and Contrast. There was a tragic undercurrent in my life all through the 1980’s. It started out as a warning of “gay cancer” and pretty much total silence from the nation’s leaders in Washington. Sometimes there would be an off-hand joke or snickering from those in power but this oncoming crisis was pretty much ignored. So long as it was only the queers dying nobody cared. I don’t think Ronald Reagan ever said the word “AIDS” during his entire administration. Doing a compare and contrast of how I survived the “AIDS Years” to the Corona Virus today, I feel like I’ve lived a lifetime in the past three months. The dotard (I will not say or type the orange turd’s name) totally disregarded the freight train of this pandemic and instead attempted to gaslight the nation.”
The first recognised cases of the AIDS epidemic emerged in the early 1980s among gay men in New York and Los Angeles. By mid-1982, a group of community leaders had proposed the term AIDS, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) adopted later that year. The epidemic spread rapidly, but the media gave it little airtime and the sitting president, Ronald Reagan, did not mention AIDS publicly until the fall 1985. Federal funding specifically for AIDS research was also not allocated until autumn that year – four years after the CDC published its first report. This loud silence and inaction from the wider community as well as the government caused a massive number of deaths and suffering, and it is this silence that resonates with Brickpaver’s experience of COVID-19. He compared the governments presiding over each crisis, referencing the acting presidents at these two times and describing their inaction similarly (“pretty much ignore” and “total disregard”).
Both crises relate to health and affect some parts of the population disproportionally (gay men and older people, respectively). Second, both crises lacked a strong institutional response. Ronald Reagan took years to publicly acknowledge the AIDS crisis, while Donald Trump suggested that drinking bleach might help with COVID-19. The resonance between these two crises were connected through Brickpaver’s experience, revealing how the past can help people make sense of a new situation in the present.
Embodied Resonances
Brickpaver’s experience of the 9/11 attacks produced an embodied reaction, drawing parallels to a range of other violent societal events. During one of our talks, he described this embodied experience, revealing the emotional weight that 9/11 carried for him:
“It was, it was almost like how–it was almost like after President Kennedy was shot. There was just an empty, empty hollow feeling inside and you just felt washed out and you just felt dead. It was just a dead feeling that you felt and I’m trying to think of how to describe it. It it’s not so much remorse or misery or–it’s just such an empty, empty feeling and you just feel bleak and lifeless and like all the color’s been taken out of life. And I felt like that with 9/11, and then I felt like that with all the mass shootings. It’s like almost every time there’s a mass shooting, I would feel that way, and when the Pulse nightclub happened that really sent me on a tailspin.”
Brickpaver felt an “empty, empty feeling” and that the “colour [was] taken out of one’s life”, a sensation he had also experienced during Kennedy’s assassination and subsequent mass shootings, particularly the Pulse nightclub (a gay club in Orlando, Florida) attack in 2016 – one of the deadliest shootings. These events all happened unexpectedly and were extremely violent, leading to similar feelings of hollowness and despair. This immediate embodied resonance seemed to be rooted in the similarities between the events, both being abrupt and violent terrorist attacks.
By focusing on 9/11 as an example of embodied resonance, Brickpaver’s experience serves as an illustration of how distinct crises can elicit similar immediate physical and embodied reactions. One thing is learning to recognise and deal with a crisis intellectually; another is to respond to a more visceral and emotional signal that indicates the onset of a possible rupture.
Cumulative Resonances
After spending time with Brickpaver, he told us about an event never mentioned in his diary - one that condensed a long period of hardship of grief. He described this event as “the straw that broke the camel’s back”. When we asked Brickpaver what led him to describe it as one of the worst things that happened, considering everything he went through, it was clearly a related to a number of ruptures in that period:
“Well, it was a culmination. Because all through the 90 s, I lost over 50 people that were close to me. And then my mom died. And then [partner’s] cat died on me. When I was trying to move down here, you had the plant up in [north], it didn’t want people to move out because it was going to get them below a certain people level, that was going to change all the union positions around. The union down here didn’t want people to come down because it screwed up their seniority. So, there was nobody to fight for you. There was supposed to be a move coming down here and it just vanished. […] And so having to go through all of that and have my life be on hold, I was living… I didn’t have anything. Everything I owned was a thousand miles away down here in [city]. And I was just living in limbo. I was working 60 hours a week because there wasn’t anything else to do.”
Brickpaver explained that he was stuck due to conflicts between his employer and the union, using the term “limbo” to make sense of the in-betweenness he felt – a space between where he was and where he wanted to be. And we see how Brickpaver’s unique trajectory to life led to the camel’s back breaking. His sexual orientation and profession exposed him both to the AIDS crisis and to the instabilities of the automobile industry and therefore entangled different, seemingly unrelated crises in his life, and their resonating together contributed to the severity situation.
Fortunately, at this point, Brickpaver managed to navigate the rupture largely thanks to his friends, who “all came around and got me through it”, becoming a social resource. When the transfer finally materialised, moving south, he said, helped him “reset”: “I just had to walk into the door. And my – it is like my life started again”. His transition was further supported by adopting two kittens from the shelter, “those two kittens came home with me. And they just – once we got into our routine, it was like the clouds parted and the sun came through. I mean, it was just an upward from that time on”.
What can be learned from resonances?
Through these resonances, Brickpaver created strategies that allowed him to keep crises and ruptures at arm’s length and nurture an ability to both recognise when dark clouds are forming and how to respond. He talks about “an armour” he developed during the AIDS crisis, which enabled him to deal with loss. Similarly, past ruptures seem to have resonated forward so that when he “feel[s] life going in that direction again”, Brickpaver now recognizes the signals – perhaps the onset of another potential rupture. An example here is handling the Trump election:
“Yeah. Well, well like when Trump was elected. You know, that set me in such a, such a sense of depression. But I would journal. I’d work on my journal. And I’d, I’d be working on that. And I stopped watching the news pretty much. I didn’t concentrate on that so much. And I would go to Celtic music. And I would have that playing in the background when I would work on my journal. And then I would work out in the yard. And things would just get better. They, you know, I’m not going to say they were ecstatically happy.”
Trump’s election in 2016 sent Brickpaver into “such a state of depression”. However, instead of being consumed by these feelings, the resonance between crises had taught Brickpaver to recognise the potential onset of a rupture and how to act to mitigate its possible consequences. He mobilised a series of resources – journaling, listening to Celtic music, working in the garden, or engaging in one of his restoration projects. This is a testimony to how people can learn through and from hardship.
While people may be aware of a collective crisis, it only becomes a rupture when affecting people’s lives – focusing on a single life, as diaries affords, can help up better understand the unique ways people experience and potentially develop through crises, while also highlighting the shortcoming of universal descriptions.
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