A Sudden Flash of Realisation

Okay. I'm not healed. I'm a long way from it. In fact, I probably never will be fully healed, in the sense that I will always have to guard against a relapse, most likely for the rest of my life. But I suddenly realised, today, how much progress I've made.

I was passing the mirror in the hall this morning - okay, I know I'm supposed to be look-free. But I'm glad I took that quick glance in passing, because otherwise I wouldn't have seen what I did. A really huge and disgusting scab that I inflicted on myself on Monday evening, was healed to the point of just being a big flake of white skin attached to my face, and a couple of smaller ones were the same. I haven't been touching and I haven't washed my face since I showered on Tuesday, so the drying skin never got knocked off. I never even knew about it, and I was probably walking around looking like that for all of Thursday in school. It looked WEIRD. I picked it off, just because it genuinely wasn't a scab anymore and looked like I had eczema on my face or something.

The picking felt really strange.

And that was when I realised that I hadn't picked - I'm talking about actual fingernail scab-picking, not popping spots - for ages and ages. I hadn't even thought about it. The compulsion to squeeze out my comedones and clogged pores was so strong, and it was taking all my willpower to resist it, I just completely forgot all about picking at scabs.

Given that picking scabs is how this all started, that's a pretty big deal. As a little kid, ie birth to puberty, I was picking ALL the friggin time - face, arms, legs, body, I didn't care. That was the original habit. Popping zits came later, in my teens. I'm still struggling to rid myself of that. But the original habit is pretty much licked.

That's amazing. Not just for itself, but also for the message it gives me about the other half of this problem:

I can do it. I can do it. I can do it.

clever girl, way to go; three stickers in a row