“Pray for me, I want to see the light, pray for me,” were the pleas from 20-year-old Kaylee Muthart as she sat on the steps to a church in South Carolina on February 6, 2018, gouging her own eyes out with her fingers.

She was high on methamphetamine and her mind was a war zone. She believed she had to offer God a sacrifice in order to save the world. That sacrifice was her own eyes.

Now, a month on, Kaylee has returned home from the hospital. She is blind, and her vision will never return, but she says “life is more beautiful” now she’s no longer using drugs.

“It’s the same life, but I’m just learning everything in a new way,” Muthart told People. “Life’s more beautiful now, life’s more beautiful than it was being on drugs. It is a horrible world to live in.”

She and her mother, Katy Tompkins, are sharing their story as a warning to others of the dangers of drugs.

“Please anyone who reads this and is thinking about doing methamphetamine, don’t!” Katy wrote to a GoFundMe page, raising money for Kaylee to have a service dog.

“Her mind having to sift through what’s real and what isn’t. She has to be reassured quite a bit that no one’s tricking her because she’s so afraid of what the drugs did to her. That drug is evil, pure evil.”

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Kaylee was introduced to drugs by a coworker and, though she quit using for a time, she returned to it when she started feeling lonely and isolated.

Just days before she was scheduled to enter a rehabilitation facility, she used the methamphetamine that police believe was laced with other chemicals, People reports.

The combination made her see the world, quite literally, as upside down.

“I thought everyone who had died was stuck in their graves, that God was up in Heaven alone, and that I had to sacrifice something important to be able to release everyone in the world to God,” the 20-year-old said.

“It made the world darker, and took everything I believed in and distorted them to make me go down the path to pulling out my eyes.”

How old was Kaylee Muthart when she gouged her eyes out on meth? The truth is heartbreaking https://t.co/8NQzEBT6ge pic.twitter.com/Xrk05FrglB

— HelloGiggles (@hellogiggles) March 9, 2018

She said she was scared, and ferociously determined.

When people walking by tried to help her, she fought them off. It took a team of deputies to restrain her long enough to transport her to hospital.

“It was scary, I didn’t understand what God wanted of me, but it made me feel a sense of righteousness that I had to be the one to do it,” she said of her drug-induced state. “And I was glad to do it because I’ve always had a big heart and nobody’s ever giving me that love back.”

“I proceeded to pull out my eyes with my bare hands and twisted them, and pulled them, and popped them. I told the pastor who showed up, ‘Pray for me, I want to see the light, pray for me’.”

Now, humour and music is helping Kaylee move past the trauma and rebuild her life. She says she still “sees” the things that are familiar to her. That she can see her mother’s face and her home, for example, but she’s just not seeing with her eyes. “I’ll forget I’m blind sometimes because I know what’s around me,” she said.

Most importantly, she is herself.

“I’m able to be Kaylee again. I’d rather be blind and be myself than be Kaylee on drugs, and I truly mean that with my heart,” she said.

“I’m Kaylee Jean Muthart, just like I was 10 years ago. But better.”