merry christmas, i look like a monster

i did the 21 day challenge. i made it 4 days. til the end of xmas eve. then, i went on a tyraid christmas morning before work; i guess its cuz its christmas day and i have to work and my family is all away. im alone. the first few days, it was great. i bought mad expensive {surprisingly} colored post-its and put pretty christmas trees and heart stickers on them and stuck them on my mirror. pink, green, blue, then purple {the ones they gave me the least amount of. i was saving them for special times}. it was this one spot on my face. i am a face picker and any sign of a pimple or "enlarged" pore will set me off. during the challenge, i let it go. to me though, it kept getting bigger and i wished i had done something about it sooner. finally this morning, i indulged, promising i would only do that one. it turned into my whole face. you see, what made me do the challenge in the first place was in part due to a recent dermatology appointment. my picking led to an enormous cyst on my cheek for months. once my doctor drained it, it was still miscolored albeit much smaller. this was clearly not good enough for me since it was still visible. what really set me off though, was in the days following, i picked again and was dead set convinced that i had created another unbearable cyst on my forehead. there was no point of entry that i could tell, from years of experience, that would make it go away without medical attention. {i have been picking my face for 10 years, and i am 21. my mom showed me what a rush it was to see blood and pus come out, almost like cutting, which i had a brief stint with but decided that simply picking to get the same rush was more acceptable and humane. hmmm...} it is completely overwhelmingly addicting and i feel like im in a trance when i do it. i really feel like im helping myself sometimes. Anyway, christmas morning i saw a small hole in the cyst that in my experience would tell me that it's ready to come. sorry if this language does not resonate with you all. it's just my own story. i proded at it thinking that i could walk away eventually without applying pressure. but the vision of percieved whiteness among redness and, the compulsion was too strong and i gave it all my might. all or nothing. at first i was highly anxious, but then it happened: it burst. my anxiety deteriorated and was replaced by euphoria. i had conquered the "cyst". but it still looked horrible. and i still wanted to stop. so much so, that i took a picture of my face right after picking for the second time/episode on christmas, hoping to show myself how ugly i really am on camera and use it as negative reinforcement, or a scare tactic, rather than "positive reinforcement" like the sticky notes and 21 day challenge. it was disgusting. i looked like i had been punched in the face multiple times, like a domestic violence victim. but i had done it all to myself. self injurous. i felt like i was beating a dead horse but couldnt stop. i have tried so many things over the years. Covering up my whole mirror with magazine pictures, but i needed space to put on my makeup to cover up what is already there. {its a cycle}. Wearing gloves, but my nails would cut through them. {i am persistent and i cannot get in the habit of wearing gloves everytime i enter the bathroom because i deny that they will be necessary, it's just that im extremely impulsive}. fake nails didnt work. i didnt give habit reversal enough of a shot without getting discouraged. putting sticker stars on my calendar helped for a while, but never sustainingly. the most hope i have gotten from watching all the videos on this site is the OCD factor of this disorder. i really feel like no one can understand my behaviors, and even close people i have told do not fully understand. but once i learned more about ocd, which i actually denied having until this point {i always just thought of picking as "oc spectrum", easier to say but whatever that means}, i realized that i do not always feel alone even though many people cannot understand my struggle.