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Deep into my first session of ketamine therapy for treatment—resistant depression, I could feel myself floating toward a giant martini glass.
Then I was in the glass. Then I was the glass. Then I was the table holding the glass. Then the ground beneath the table. With each step, I felt myself disappear—not in fear, not in pain, but with a strange kind of gladness.
I wasn’t trying to end my life.
I just didn’t want to be in it.
Then came the thought—quiet, quizzical: Why do I want to disappear so badly?
I cried through the rest of the session and into the night. Not over anything specific. Not over a memory. Just the unbearable clarity that I was willing to become anything—alcohol, glass, furniture, floor—as long as I didn’t have to be me.
When I asked my therapist if he thought it was a sign of wanting to die, he said, “That’s not a metaphor for death. It’s a metaphor for erasure.” Only later could I see it for what it was. Not a death wish. A mirror. Reflecting the buried trauma of a family trying to erase its past.
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My American mother didn’t divorce my Ecuadorian father as much as she escaped from him. Flew out of the capital Quito with the kids on the pretense of some family matter. Practically filed for divorce as soon as the Pan Am flight landed on the tarmac of Miami’s international airport.
I was ten. Never saw or heard from my father again. Or his big, warm South American family. The separation was painful, the erasure worse.
It started when we moved in with Mom’s new husband. She forbade us to speak Spanish in the house——said he didn’t like it. “He’s done a lot for us,” she said. “The least you can do is stop making him feel uncomfortable in his own home.”
Now, this shouldn’t have been that big a deal. We could have just kept Spanish between us, used it quietly when Mom’s new husband wasn’t around. But that’s not what happened. We did something so inexplicable scientists have a hard time explaining it: we lost the ability to speak Spanish.
The four of us, once fluent, dreaming, and thinking in the language, could no longer speak it. Within a week or two of Mom’s shaming command, it was gone. Wiped. We couldn’t string together a single sentence in Spanish.
In school, we took beginner Spanish classes and almost failed them. It’s as if our brains had been reset to factory settings, with the Spanish language app permanently deleted.
How was this kind of “language amnesia” possible? “What you’re describing,” my therapist said, “is an extremely rare form of ‘language attrition,’ driven by a profound psychological response to trauma.
You lost your father, an extended family, and cultural ties. Your mother likely represented the last remaining anchor, the only source of stability and protection in a dangerous world. Losing your ability to speak Spanish was a survival instinct. You were guarding the relationship with your mother, your last protector. You were doing what children often do in times of trauma——anything to keep the bond with the person who represents security, even if it means sacrificing a piece of who you are.”
It was one of the first times I disappeared. Not physically. But culturally. Personally. Silently.
Then They Changed My Name—and My Race
When I was ten, my stepfather adopted me and my siblings. The state issued a new birth certificate that didn’t just change our last names—it changed our race.
Overnight, we were no longer Latino. We were legally white.
Alvear, our last name, was replaced by Strousberg, the last name of my mother’s new husband.
If Mom used a soft cloth to wipe away my sibling’s link to our father, she took a sandblaster to mine. I was named Ernesto after my father, a name that carried the weight of his legacy. But when the new birth certificates came, I stared in disbelief. My birth name, Ernesto Michael Alvear, was gone, obliterated. In its place was Michael Nathan Strousberg.
Ernesto, my father’s name, was erased entirely, and my middle name, Michael, was moved up to take its place. In its stead, my mother inserted Nathan—her father’s name—as my new middle name. I, Ernesto Michael Alvear, had become Michael Nathan Strousberg.
The shock wasn’t that my mother had done it. She had lobbied me to do it, so it wasn’t like I didn’t know it was coming. I had consented to it, though as a twelve—year—old who saw his mother as the last outpost to safety and security, I’m not sure the word consent quite captures the dynamic.
I remember staring at my new birth certificate like it was a police report declaring me a missing person. Or worse, a death certificate for my former self, an officially sanctioned obituary for who I used to be.
The birth certificate also listed my mother’s new husband as my biological father, a bureaucratic sleight of hand that made me feel like I was reading someone else’s biography. And it described my race as “White,” wiping away every trace of my Latino heritage with a stroke of official ink.
There was no ceremony, no explanation. Just new paperwork and a quiet expectation that we wouldn’t talk about it. And we didn’t. Not because we agreed, but because we’d already learned that silence was what held the family together.
My mother never said, “You’re not Hispanic anymore.” But we were smart kids. We understood the message behind the form.
Years later, I would look back and realize what that document really did:
It gave legal proof that I no longer existed.
I Tried to Finish the Job They Started
No one told me to hate my skin. But I started soaking my hands in bleach when I was 12, hoping it would make them lighter.
I didn’t want to be white because I thought whiteness was beautiful. I wanted to be white because it looked like a way out. A way to finally belong. A way to stop feeling like something that needed to be erased.
Disappearing Became My Talent
By adulthood, no one was forcing me to disappear.I did it on my own.
I was the one who ignored my culture, dodged questions about my family, avoided anything that made me feel exposed or ethnic or complicated (though my olive skin inevitably gave me away).
I’d been trained to believe that my comfort depended on my invisibility. That being easy to love meant being easy to manage. That if I said too much, showed too much, insisted too much on who I really was, everything would fall apart.
And for years, that belief worked. It kept the peace. It kept relationships intact. It kept me employed, admired, agreeable. But it also kept me sick.
When I finally landed in ketamine therapy, I wasn’t trying to disappear. I was trying to come back. I just didn’t know how.
The Vision Didn’t Heal Me—It Named Me
That martini glass vision didn’t change me. It cracked something open.
Until then, I’d lived with the quiet assumption that my sadness came from a flaw in me—something I lacked or couldn’t access.
But what I saw in that vision, and what it helped me remember, suggested something else entirely: That I wasn’t broken.
I was buried.
Buried under a name that wasn’t mine. A race that wasn’t mine. A silence I never agreed to. A language I was told to forget.
I didn’t walk out of that session healed. But I did walk out——later, much later—— knowing what I’d lost—and how early I’d learned to give it away.
And that knowledge, as painful as it was, became the first step toward something I hadn’t felt in years.
Not hope. Not peace.
Just the sense that there might still be a “me” worth coming back for.
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Michael Alvear is the founder of a nonprofit site curating the largest independent research summary on ketamine therapy for mental health.
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