Fucking Facebook. I still can’t share posts with select people without them being notified. If I chose Specific Friends in the past, those friends were notified. But I was at least able to choose Friends Except… Now I can’t even do that or else they get notified too. What is it with Facebook’s obsession with not letting its users have any privacy? From now on I have to be all or nothing. It’s gotta be either private or for everyone. Maybe I’ll even go public someday. I might as well, right?

So I'm now 265 miles into my trip. I should be approximately 100 miles away from the Namibia border.

Did another painting, but I need to make improvements to it. It's a large neon pink flower with some white in it on a round canvas. What's cool is that the royal blue background bleeds through and makes it look like a multi-colored flower.

During my 7th session with Helen, I was glad her dogs weren’t barking in the background as they have a couple of times. I found it rather annoying when I was in the middle of saying something to her or trying to hear what she was saying to me.

We mostly discussed how my mother left me to fend for myself when I didn't eat or drink for a few days and awoke with serious dehydration on the third day. I seriously wonder to this day if I would have made it if the kitchen cabinet wasn't just outside the little bedroom I was in. It took me all day to muster up the strength to jump up, open the cabinet, and grab the first thing I could which was a Devil Dog. After I laid back down on the bed, it took me forever just to get the strength to open the damn wrapper let alone eat it.

“You got yourself into this mess, you get yourself out of it," the bitch said, and then went back to her backgammon game with her bestie. This was at our summer cottage in Connecticut in the 70s. I was around 10 years old, give or take a year or two.

I felt helpless at the time, but like most kids, I didn't question the adults. I assumed they knew it all. Eventually, I got the strength to shower and I fully recovered a few days later. Then I got on with my life. As they say, kids are pretty resilient. It's when you get to be an adult that you look back and realize just how messed up some of the adults who were supposed to protect you truly were. She really took a gamble with my life, thanks to her selfishness, lack of empathy and compassion. If she hadn't constantly picked on my appearance and my weight, maybe I wouldn't have been dumb enough to not eat or drink in the first place. As a kid, I didn't understand that humans can go a lot longer without food as opposed to liquids.

Helen asked me what I would tell that little girl if I could. I opened my mouth to answer but then realized my mind was blank. Having no experience with kids, I was at a loss as to what would be best to say.

But then Helen had the perfect answer. “Let's get you something to eat and drink, sweetie, and then let's talk about why you're not eating or drinking."

That's what Dureen O should have told her daughter.