Yes. a reason you might be having so much problems with this piece is that the lighting on the original photo was pretty flat in the first place, so if you were to make a good pixel piece out of it you'd have to use a pretty unique shading to do that, and you're just not that far in your pixel expertise to do that.
Add to that, you dont really have any dominant face feature, your face is pretty well equlibrated and it's hard to make a distinctive picture out of it.
next time, try a more interesting angle and dont use the camera's flash...