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.

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.

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.