Clothes shopping and obsessive online scrolling

I had a few gift cards for Joann fabrics saved up from when I was in highschool, it was at least 150$ worth of Joanns gift cards. But I always feel a lot of guilt and anxiety surrounding spending money and I never used them, I always felt like I hadn’t earned it. About a month ago or so, I talked with my therapist about spending them online as an exposure. I added a bunch of things to my cart and then at the last minute, I closed out of the page and didn’t go through with it. I felt so anxious about choosing the wrong things, and so guilty about how wasteful and frivolous it is to buy new things for fun. I always feel guilty buying new things because the system is so unethical, and also because I feel like I haven’t earned them. I think about all the things I still need to do and how irresponsible I have been, and how spoiled I must be that I think I deserve all these shiny new things because I want them while other people are homeless or struggling just to eat. I always think about how I should spend my money donating to better causes because there are people who need it more than me, but I also never feel like I can donate anywhere because I get worried about how much to donate and wether I’m a bad person for not giving enough. Well anyway, Joann fabrics is going out of business now. So I finally went in person to spend them, but it turns out they no longer accept gift cards due to the store going bankrupt. I know it sounds silly, and it’s just a silly craft store and ultimately in the grand scheme of life it is not a big deal, but I feel so disappointed that I wasn’t able to follow through with the goal I had set before. I always thought I would save them for a special time when I had earned them, but that time never came, there is not some magical occasion where I feel like I have finally earned my own permission. It’s just a cycle of refusing to reward myself because I always feel like I haven’t earned it. I’m not sure exactly where I’m going with this, I haven’t posted on here before because I always talk myself out of it but the whole thing just got me thinking. I don’t wanna spend my life waiting until I have done enough good deeds and cleared my moral slate enough that I have earned the right to live my life, that time never comes. It just really hit me today

I'm thinking of trying some ERP on my own while I wait for treatment, but I'm having some trouble knowing what is a compulsion and what would be good exposure. For example, I have huge fears of being a narcissist and/or a generally bad person. So whenever I watch a movie or read something that has an evil character in it I automatically compare myself to that character and stress over if I'm like that person. A couple of things I do when this happens is Google other people's experiences, seek reassurance, rumination, etc. Sometimes I'll also google different symptoms of narcissism, freak out over things that I relate to, then get relief over things I don't. So my confusion is, would researching people who have narcissism be an exposure, or a compulsion since it's something I sometimes do during a spiral? Or, would the exposure be watching movies/living life hearing these stories, and refraining from the spiral of rumination and no Googling at all?

I have a lot of compulsions that seem hoarding-esque but I can’t figure out which subtype of OCD they fall under. The two major drivers of this for me seem to be a fear that I will forget about them or the memories attached to them or that the things and their significance will be lost to time, and that I might need or want them in the future. I compulsively make lists of things (ex. things I like, things I don’t like, who I am, the contents of my ideal fridge - very plain with lots of fruit) just in case. I heart nearly every song I hear on Spotify (except the ones I actively strongly dislike, of which there are not many) just in case I will forget about them later on (and because I feel guilty about not hearting the song and supporting the artist if I have no valid reason not to but that’s a whole other can of worms). I have a couple containers of “good” boxes of all shapes and sizes that I’ve collected that, as it turns out, I never actually look at or use. When I was very little, before my family and I knew I had OCD, I had a “sticker book” in which I would put every sticker I ever got - because I didn’t like the idea of putting them on anything that I might lose access to. I even found my mother’s stamps and obsessively put one of each kind in my sticker book (there were soo many, it took me hours). I have trouble letting go of things, especially if I have any sort of memory attached to it whatsoever. Because, my mind says, what if I forget? My camera roll consists, in large part, of an enormous amount of screenshots of far too many little things that I encounter, and it is extremely rare that I actually look back at them. But the other data I was looking for something I thought I took a screenshot of and I couldn’t find it, so this compulsion is back and much worse. On my computer I can’t open the photos app without it crashing and the number of screenshots I have on there is shown in eight digits. I also have tens of thousands of tabs open in my browser at any given moment (I can’t close them, what if I forget?). I really wish I were exaggerating. I also take an excessive amount of photos of many things throughout my day (I counted once and I took 46 pictures of the same tree when I went on a walk). These are just some little examples of how this obsession manifests in me and my life. Does anyone else experience something similar? I’d love to hear about it.