Meth is a hell of a drug. I just want to mention, before I get into this story, that doctors used to prescribe this stuff as a weight-loss pill called Desoxyn. True story. Keep that in mind as I tell you about how 20-year-old Kaylee Muthart lost a good couple of ounces on meth by literally ripping her eyes out of her head. I actually had to read her essay in Cosmo twice because the first time I was convinced it was just someone outlining the plot of a Junji Ito comic.
Let me give you some background here: Muthart is a Christian who had an undiagnosed mental illness that she tried to self-medicate with recreational drugs.
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.
Haven’t we all been there? I have heard that ecstasy makes the Bible really intense. Like that thing about “Blessed are the cheesemakers”? Beautiful.
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.
I do the same thing but with chocolate, so I can perfectly relate to exactly what she’s going through.
It was then I remember thinking that someone had to sacrifice something important to right the world, and that person was me. I thought everything would end abruptly, and everyone would die, if I didn’t tear out my eyes immediately. I don’t know how I came to that conclusion, but I felt it was, without doubt, the right, rational thing to do immediately.
I got on my hands and knees, pounding the ground and praying, “Why me? Why do I have to do this?” I later realized this wasn’t a personal religious calling — it was something anyone on drugs could have experienced.
This is true, once when I was in high school one of my friends was near tears because he was high and convinced that Darth Vader was tyring to kill him. Being the great friends that we are, we put our hands over our mouths and did that Vader breathing thing. He didn’t rip his eyeballs out, though.
Next, a man I’d been staying with, who happened to have a Biblical name, drove by and called out the window, “I locked up the house. Do you have the other key?” A sign, I thought, that my sacrifice is the key to saving the world.
Makes sense, I often think a roommate asking me if I remembered my keys is a sign from god. If this had happened 500 years ago, this idiot would be the patron saint of France.
So I pushed my thumb, pointer, and middle finger into each eye. I gripped each eyeball, twisted, and pulled until each eye popped out of the socket — it felt like a massive struggle, the hardest thing I ever had to do. Because I could no longer see, I don’t know if there was blood. But I know the drugs numbed the pain. I’m pretty sure I would have tried to claw right into my brain if a pastor hadn’t heard me screaming, “I want to see the light!” — which I don’t recall saying — and restrained me. He later said, when he found me, that I was holding my eyeballs in my hands. I had squished them, although they were somehow still attached to my head.
I’m being punked, right? This is like, viral marketing for a Hostel remake or something, right?
It took losing my sight to get me back on the right path, but from the bottom of my heart, I’m so glad I’m here.
I guess she’s an “eye socket half full” kind of person at the end of the day.
F**k you.
Me sad >_<