A 20-year-old South Carolina woman has opened up about what life has been like since she removed both of her eyes last month while she was high on methamphetamine. If you missed the post, read it HERE
Kaylee Muthart says: “Life’s more beautiful now, life’s more beautiful than it was being on drugs. It is a horrible world to live in.”
Kaylee, who struggled with drug addiction from a very young age, said she gouged out her eyes because she thought that by so doing, she was sacrificing herself for the world.
She said: “I thought I was sacrificing myself for the world. It wasn’t voices, but I thought it was real.”
Before pulling out her eyes, Kaylee, who was high on methamphetamine, began hallucinating. The last thing she saw was a light pole morphing into a white dove. The trees appeared to curl downward and the skies darkened as if a storm were gathering. She sensed the world was ending, so she began to dig into the sockets of her green eyes, believing that somehow by plucking them out she might save the world.
The visions would be the last thing she ever would see as she knelt alongside railroad tracks, screaming in pain after gouging out her eyes and damaging her optic nerves.
Below is her story as told to Cosmopolitan:
Just over a month ago, I could see. Or maybe I should put it this way: I had both my eyes, but they didn’t help me notice how dangerous my life had become.
Then, on February 6, my world went black.
I had been a straight-A student in Anderson, South Carolina—I was even in the National Honor Society when I left school at age 17, midway through eleventh grade. Between working long hours to save up for a car, and missing school because of a heart arrhythmia, my grades had begun to slip. I thought taking time off from school would be better than tarnishing my academic record and would leave me with a better chance at securing a college scholarship to study marine biology, which I’d always wanted to do
By age 18, I was drinking alcohol socially and smoking pot often, while working diligently at my part-time job. I suspected I was prone to addiction, since it ran in my family, so I actively avoided what I considered more serious drugs.
But when I was 19 last summer, I was smoking pot with an acquaintance at his house and got a strange high. Later, I googled the symptoms that surprised me the most — numb lips and feeling like I was on top of the world. I’d long been a religious Christian; the high made me feel particularly close to God.
I think the pot I’d smoked had been laced with either cocaine or meth, both of which are stimulants. I was surprised, since I’d never perceived weed as a gateway drug, but here I was, being exposed to substances I never wanted in my life.
Because I’d gotten the pot from the friend I smoked with, I felt like he’d betrayed me and left my job to distance myself from him. I didn’t end up going back to school.
I didn’t have a job and my relationship with my boyfriend of two years began to deteriorate. To cope, I kept smoking pot and drinking alcohol and started taking Xanax recreationally. On the verge of our breakup, I had a mental breakdown. (Months later, in February 2018, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. It made sense, since when I felt happy, I felt super happy, and when I felt down, I felt deeply depressed. The turbulence left me especially susceptible to drug abuse, my doctors later told me.)
I finally got a new job, but having lost my boyfriend and a series of close friends, I was lonely and unhappy. I remembered the way I felt on the laced weed and sought that kind of peace again.
At the end of August, with another acquaintance, I decided to smoke meth for the first time. I stayed up for nearly three days and experienced hallucinations I wasn’t expecting — when I looked in the mirror, I thought I saw blackheads coming out of my face and I spent an hour picking at my skin until I drew blood. When my roommate dropped me off for work that evening, I was too embarrassed by my welts to go inside. Soon after, as a result of missing work, I lost my job.
When I sobered up, I watched a video I’d filmed when I was high, and it totally freaked me out — the girl I saw, who kept talking and talking, seemed so different from the real me.
After that, I steered clear of meth but felt so low that I asked one of my roommates, who dealt drugs, for ecstasy. At the time, the substance seemed safer than cocaine or meth, since I knew people used it to feel more free when they partied. I thought it would make me feel more confident; when it delivered, I started taking it once or twice a day on most days until the end of November.
While on ecstasy, I studied the Bible. I misinterpreted a lot of it. I convinced myself that meth would bring me even closer to God.
So, after Thanksgiving, when I was feeling particularly lonely, I smoked meth with a friend. Within two months, I progressed to snorting it, then shooting it as often as I could by myself or with friends. I was surrounded by heavy drug users.
Two or three times, I tried to stop: I carried meth in my pocket all day as if to prove, “This stuff is my bitch,” but I always ended up taking it.
My mom realized I was struggling with mental-health issues and drug abuse but later said she felt helpless; I wouldn’t commit to going to a drug rehab or a psychiatric facility, and without proof that I was a danger to myself, she couldn’t have me committed. Although I didn’t even have a place to live — I’d been sleeping at different people’s houses since moving out at 17 — I told her I had everything under control and avoided speaking to her.
On February 4, I finally saw her again. She’d found a rehab facility for me, and I agreed to go the following week. I later learned she had recorded our conversation, during which I said I didn’t want to be in the world because it was too evil — the proof she felt she needed to get a court order and commit me.
But the next day, I bought meth from my drug dealer. After a friend tried to stop me, I shot up that night. I took a larger dose than I’d ever used before.