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Student who tore out own eyeballs while high is fired from her job

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In the court of public opinion, some stories are so shocking they become frozen in time. For Kaylee Muthart, that moment occurred on a cold morning in 2018 outside a church in Anderson, South Carolina. Under the grip of a devastating, drug-induced psychotic episode, the then-20-year-old student committed an act of self-mutilation so horrific it made international headlines: she tore out her own eyeballs with her bare hands.

To the millions who read those initial, sensationalized stories, Kaylee was a cautionary tale—a tragic, permanent statistic of the crystal meth epidemic.

But behind the gruesome headlines lay a living, breathing human being determined not to let her darkest day define her. Over the last eight years, Kaylee has quietly rebuilt her life from the ground up, conquering addiction, pursuing an education, and learning to navigate a world of total darkness.

Now, a recent turn of events has thrust her back into the spotlight. Having recently been fired from her job as a dishwasher, Kaylee’s reaction to the setback isn’t anger or defeat. Instead, she has declared she has “no regrets”—revealing a moral compass that remains completely unbroken, even if her vision is gone.

The Nightmare of 2018: “Someone Had to Sacrifice”

To understand the depth of Kaylee’s current resilience, one must first look back at the terrifying precipice she climbed out of.

Her descent into drug abuse began relatively conventionally, smoking marijuana in high school. But the slope quickly steepened. Soon, she progressed to smoking, and eventually injecting, methamphetamine. By the winter of 2018, her mother had finally convinced her to enter a rehabilitation facility. Tragically, on the eve of her scheduled check-in, Kaylee sought one final high.

It was a decision that triggered a violent, hallucinatory psychosis. The drug warped her reality, convincing her of a terrifying cosmic ultimatum: “Everyone would die if I didn’t tear out my eyes immediately.”

“I remember thinking that someone had to sacrifice something important to right the world, and that person was me,” Kaylee recalled in a raw interview with South West News Service. “I got on my hands and knees, pounding the ground and praying, ‘Why me? Why do I have to do this?’”

Believing she was saving humanity, she enacted the unthinkable.

“I pushed my thumb, pointer, and middle finger into each eye,” she explained. “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.”

A local church pastor discovered her screaming in the dirt, frantically crying out, “I want to see the light.” When he reached her, she was holding her own severed, ruptured eyeballs in her hands.

The Hard Work of Rebuilding

The horrific event left Kaylee permanently blind, but it also served as a profound, albeit agonizing, awakening. She successfully kicked her drug habit, committed to her recovery, and refused to let her disability stop her from living.

She eventually received realistic prosthetic eyeballs—a step she chose so she could “appear more normal to the outside world.” She went back to school to complete her education, and to pay her way, she took a job washing dishes at a local restaurant. For Kaylee, the humble job was a badge of honor, a tangible proof of her independence.

So when news broke that she had been fired from the establishment, many feared she had suffered a relapse or a setback. The truth, however, is remarkably different.

Fired for Compassion

Speaking to the Mirror, Kaylee revealed that she lost her dishwashing job because of a secret she was keeping in the alleyway behind the restaurant kitchen: a stray cat and her eight nursing, hungry kittens.

Every night, Kaylee had been sneaking food out of the kitchen to feed the feline family. When the restaurant’s owner discovered what she was doing, he ordered her to stop. Kaylee refused.

Instead, she began ordering a meal specifically designated for her shift, choosing to starve herself so she could hand the food directly to the mother cat. When she continued to defy the owner’s orders to stop feeding the strays on the property, she was dismissed.

“I am feeling positive after the loss of my last job,” Kaylee said, refusing to let the firing dampen her spirits. “Being fired never feels good, but I could walk away, knowing that I did what I believed in my heart was right.”

She admitted that losing her source of income is “hard on her,” but her conscience remains entirely clear.

“I could not in good conscience leave every night, knowing that there was a kitty right there waiting to be fed,” she said. “I would not have been able to walk away from that knowing that I didn’t do what I was convinced in my heart to do. So as a result, I am positive every day of my life because I am peaceful, knowing that I live without regretting my choice.”

Finding a Deeper Clarity

Kaylee’s journey is a stark reminder that sight and vision are two entirely different things. While she still experiences moments of grief—especially on sleepless nights when the weight of her physical reality sets in—she insists she is in a far healthier, happier place today than she ever was before her accident.

“Truthfully, I’m happier now than I was before all this happened,” she reflected. “I’d rather be blind than dependent on drugs.”

In a world that often struggles with empathy, a young woman who once clawed her way through the absolute darkest depths of drug psychosis is now standing tall, jobless but at peace, simply because she chose to feed a stray cat. Kaylee Muthart may have lost her eyes, but she has clearly found her light.

Published inSHQIPERI