By Deidre Freitas — If I have learned anything from adulthood, it’s that it can be incredibly lonely. Your life has changed, you no longer have a structure like high school or college to let you see friends everyday. Most often, your or your friends move across the country. Schedules get harder and harder to line up, so it can be difficult to see when someone’s struggling. If that wasn’t enough, studies like the University of Alberta’s are showing Millennials and Gen Z are more anxious than previous generations. It’s not hard to see why, with all hesitancy of the future, whether that be by the climate, the job prospects or the current pandemic we’re living through.

Sometimes, we give more than we get back from others, we get frustrated at our jobs, and at times it can feel like the whole world is closing in around us. All of that is hard enough without experiencing something as difficult as sexual assault. In This Is How I Disappear, Mirion Malle presented a startlingly honest portrayal of what someone goes through after living through such a trauma. I sat with this story long after I finished, noticing the similarities between Clara’s life and my own.

Too often people think that all the red flags that show something is wrong with someone are big and loud and clear from the start. However, those that have experienced casual suicidal ideation like Clara’s at the beginning of the novel know that there are little excuses for things that tend to pile up. Using excuses like I’m just tired or it was a long day at work until every week is a long day at work and the perpetual exhaustion is bone-deep. And so often no one wants to be an inconvenience to anyone else, especially with the shame surrounding things like mental health to begin with, so they stay silent, hoping things will get better without any real solutions in sight.

Clara, a victim of sexual assault, has deeply-rooted trauma, anxiety and depression from her experience. We see how she masks her pain and anxiety in the day and cries at night, holding in her emotions throughout the day until she’s finally alone. Her boss doesn’t respect her, some of her friends seem uninterested in understanding how her depression works and she has a major deadline approaching for her own book of poetry. Even to the most capable person these are all Herculean-sized problems.

She is a strong-willed person, even if she doesn’t see it herself. We see it in how she gets up everyday, doing what she can to make the world a little better because she’s in it. Too often people like Clara do not see their own value, or how their little actions every day have a bigger impact than they realize.

The use of black and white in the novel only expands upon Clara’s intrusive thoughts. We see as she lies awake the internal struggle she suffers because everything becomes darker, like her own mind. The grayscale of Clara’s life is at the forefront of our mind’s as we feel her confusion, exhaustion and desire for things to get better. And yet, everything is slowed down as each action is drawn out, panel by panel, showing the monotony of her everyday tasks.

Even as she struggles with her own mental health, she reaches out to help others. Coaching another girl through her own panic attack, always going above and beyond what should be required of her at work, and the frequent designated driver for her friends.

This Is How I Disappear does an excellent job of showing us how fine a person can seem on the outside, only to be tearing at themselves slowly from within. As time passes in the novel, the smaller cracks in Clara’s persona become bigger and bigger until they threaten to break her completely. She hasn’t kept in contact with her friends, no one knows where she is or why she isn’t returning any of their calls or texts.

It was both comforting and alarming at how many of Clara’s little tics and actions that I recognized as a sign she wasn’t doing so well. Having my own experiences with depressive episodes, I wanted so badly at earlier moments in the novel for her to turn and ask for help. But it’s difficult to admit something’s wrong, especially when your closest friends are thousands of miles away, like her friend who was studying abroad in Italy. I wanted to make her life better, show her that things won’t always feel like you're in the deepest depths of a pit with no way out.

But that isn’t how one sees it when experiencing something like depression.

Throughout, we hear different characters discuss the lacking access to good mental health resources. Even though this graphic novel is set in Canada, that holds true all over the world. People’s mental health isn’t considered an issue unless someone thinks they could seriously injure themselves or others. There isn’t nearly enough preventative care in the world, and so it falls to people’s loved ones to try to keep the ship afloat.

We see Clara support others until she has nothing left to give, a former shell of herself because she didn’t put her own care first. Even near the end when she’s finally starting to feel better and acknowledge her own problems, she lays next to her friend, who lies awake in the night, a look of sadness on their face.

This Is How I Disappear presents an ouroboros of exhaustion in the day-to-day lives of the younger generation. How we are more down-trodden, but we hold each other up. That we are stronger together and when we all take the time we need to recover from our lives. Things like anxiety and depression do not magically go away, nor do the traumas that cause them. But the hope is in other people: we see each other succeed, we see each other keep going even under the worst of circumstances. Because even if as we live our lives we do not see someone who knows what they’re doing, everyone around us can see how far we have come in our journeys, how long it took to be the kind of people we’ve become.

Strength comes from each other, but, as corny as it sounds, it comes from within, too.

Graphic Novel Review: This Is How I Disappear

This Is How I Disappear
Writer/Artist: Mirion Malle
Translated by: Aleshia Jensen and Bronwyn Haslam
Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly
Price: $24.95
An affecting glimpse into the ways millennials cope with mental health struggles
Clara's at a breaking point. She's got writer's block, her friends ask a lot without giving much, her psychologist is useless, and her demanding publishing job leaves little time for self care. She seeks solace in the community around her, yet, while her friends provide support and comfort, she is often left feeling empty, unable to express an underlying depression that leaves her immobilized and stifles any attempts at completing her poetry collection. In This Is How I Disappear, Mirion Malle paints an empathetic portait of a young woman wrestling with psychological stress and the trauma following a sexual assault.
Malle displays frankness and a remarkable emotional intelligence as she explores depression, isolation, and self-harm in her expertly drawn novel. Her heroine battles an onslaught of painful emotions and while Clara can provide consolation to those around her, she finds it difficult to bestow the same understanding on herself. Only when she allows her community to guide her toward self-love does she find relief.
Filled with 21st century idioms and social media communication, This Is How I Disappear opens a window onto the lives of young people as they face a barrage of mental health hurdles. Scenes of sisterhood, fun nights out singing karaoke, and impromptu FaceTime therapy sessions show how this generation is coping, connecting, and healing together.
Publication Date: October 5, 2021
More Information: This Is How I Disappear