A Lighter and a Pack of Twenty

[Content Warning added 20Jan2014 for comparisons to quitting smoking.]

Why is it that I can never get onto the StopPickingOnMe! forum on my lunch hour? It works okay at ten to nine in the a.m. But one ó clock - forget it. I wanted to get on there to quote from a thread that really inspired me a couple of days ago. Somebody was making the point that part of what makes the habit so hard to break, is that we carry our face and our hands with us everywhere we go, and there's not much avoiding mirrors either. We have to be strong all the time, every second of every day, because half a second's weakness is all it takes to muff it up. It's like a smoker trying to quit, whilst keeping a lighter and a pack of twenty in his back pocket the whole time. Or like an alcoholic trying to dry out with a six-pack still in the fridge.

It was an amazing relief to me to realise the truth in that perspective, because I felt so down on myself when Kelvin quit smoking pretty much just like that *snap*, and left me to eat his habit-breaking dust. I don't want to say it was easier for him because that's probably not true. Nicotine-dependency is a chemical addiction, and that's a can of worms that I can't claim to know anything about. But he was able to approach his problem with the tactic of putting his habit out of his reach, at least by a five minute walk to the shop. To fall off his wagon, he would have had to make a conscious decision to put his shoes and jacket on and walk to the little corner-store for a packet of fags. All I had to do was absently put my hand to my face when I was thinking about something else. The feeling of all those little lumps and bumps under my fingertips drove me instantly nuts.

I don't wish to downplay Kelvin's achievement, though - his addiction wasn't always so far out of his reach, to be fair. His workmates smoke like chimneys, and during the day he could have sponged a cigarette in less time than it took to ask. But he didn't. So all credit to him. But recognising the reasons why breaking my habit is difficult for me, all adds strings to my bow when it comes to being stood beside a mirror, trying to find the willpower to not look.

That's what it comes down to in the end, I think. Not looking. I'm learning more about how to be pickfree, all the time. Every time I fall down, I learn something new about how and why it happened, and how to avoid that particular pitfall next time. I started out, at New Year, by deciding not to pick. That didn't go so well, because I could feel the spots every time I touched my face and it was torture not to deal with them. I fell down. At the beginning of March, I resolved to combat the problem by going touch-free - this was still just over a week before I found dtM on Wikipedia and learned all about it, before I had heard of 'touch-free' as a phrase. That went pretty well for quite a while. Sixteen days, w00t! But I could still see the most obvious of the little bastards every time I looked in the mirror, and in the end that wore me down too.

It's like a weed. It needs taking out at the root or it will just grow back. And the root of the problem is not the compulsion. The compulsion is the symptom. The root is the obsession. I need to remove the obsession from my mind. I need to deny myself all contact with my face - both tactile and visual.

If I don't see it and I don't touch it, I won't know it's there to scratch it.

It's hard-line approach. But I've realised that I've been doing this thing half-assed and it hasn't been working - not in the long term, anyway. It's easy to think, when I have seven or eight stickers in a row, that I'm strong enough to just look without picking. And probably, for that one time, I am. But then over the next few days I look more and more often, and the obsession builds, and the compulsion gets stronger... And then I fall down flat on my blotchy weeping face. And I think, "Dammit! How did that happen?" Like an idiot.

Even when I just want to look to see how amazingly well I'm doing, and admire the clearness of my skin, I know that my eyes will uncontrollably zoom in on the tiniest little blemish disrupting the harmony of my complexion. And when I find one - which I will, even if I have to pretend to wonder if that freckle might really be a blocked pore - when I find one, that little place inside my mind will start its relentless irresistible itching, slowly driving me insane until I gouge the flesh from my face and leave a gaping red sore there.

So, look-free. It's the future. And I'm going to be 100% touch-free too, as opposed to March when I was washing my face three time a day and running my hands all over that maddening-ness. If I really want to wash my face, I'll take a shower. My complexion isn't actually greasy. It doesn't need washing every day, regular washing with water only dries my skin out and makes it want to produce more oil, which causes more spots. I could moisturise - but then I'd have my hands all over my face and I'd be back to square one. And why bother to constantly dry it out and then remoisturise, when I could just leave it alone to be perfectly happy at its natural balance?

No touching. No looking. If I can break the obsession then the compulsions will take care of themselves. This is as close as I can possibly get to throwing the lighter and the pack of twenty off a cliff. My face needs to stop existing to me.

clever girl, way to go; one sticker in a row