This is beautiful! Thank you for sharing the detailed behind-the-scenes write up! I was wondering many of these questions as I often do when looking at work like this, and resigned myself to "ah, what's the point, I'll never the answer" and was absolutely delighted to read this. It even made me pay more attention to the piece, I hadn't thought about the book covers being blurred, or that the Monster cans were open vs closed.
My first thought when seeing this is that I was 100% sure you decided to look away very intentionally, either because you preferred to remain anonymous despite the self portrait or because you just didn't enjoy drawing faces. So that was a big surprise that that part was a bit of a lucky happenstance!