As a student who comes from a background of educational instability (I have switched schools eleven times since kindergarten, the majority of those switching back and forth to homeschool) the one constant I have had throughout my life is technology. Because my access to the outside world was limited, I was able to make friends through the internet. After I had discovered that I had access to an entirely different world, a digital world, I realized that technology has had a dramatic transformation on life as humanity used to know it. It has dramatically transformed the way that humans go about anything anymore; regardless of the reason, technology is the first thing we turn to. Through the power of the internet, it is possible to communicate with people across the world in a matter of minutes, and it is as if you are talking to them in person.  Specifically, through the power of an app called FaceTime, I was able to dramatically transform my life in just seven hours, and it’s all thanks to my cousin Jonna.
In order to understand my transformation, we must first explain Jonna’s. My cousin Jonna grew up in an incredibly dysfunctional household. Her mother never allowed her to meet her father, and he died several years ago. She has lived with her two moms for the past several years now. They’ve never treated her as well as I’ve wanted them to. Jonna and her biological mom used to live with us when Jonna and I were very young. Eventually, they moved to Louisiana, and away from us. However, they were struck by Hurricane Katrina, and Jonna came back to live with us.
Once her mother got their housing situation worked out, I rarely saw Jonna. Her mother, Janelle, disagreed with our extended family on some issues involving custody of our sick grandfather (Janelle’s father) that she took very personally. Because of this, she cut off communication with everybody in our family. I only saw Jonna one time during a five year time period, and that was on my twelfth birthday. Regardless of this, we still talked often. However, Jonna was not an incredibly happy person as a young teenager. During the time that we were not active parts of each others’ lives, she struggled with a lot of various issues (as every high-schooler does) and ended up taking her inner anguish out on me quite often. As a result, Jonna and I stopped talking for around two years.
When we started talking again, it was me who had developed issues, while she had conquered most of hers. At this point in my life, I did not want to be alive because I did not enjoy living. I hated myself, my family, and couldn’t find anything that I wanted to live for, just as she had experienced earlier. These feelings went on for just over two years before Jonna and I began to develop our relationship again. As someone who had previously dealt with many of the same issues, she was eager to help me deal with mine. One night, I decided to FaceTime her, as we hadn’t actually talked face-to-face in several years. FaceTime is an iPhone application that allows you to videochat other people, so that you can communicate with them both verbally and audibly at the same time. It started out as a normal conversation, but as time progressed, the conversation grew more serious.
Jonna was dedicated to helping me understand why loving who you are is important. She was relentless in her attempts to prove that making an active effort at improving my mindset would improve the quality of my life. Eventually, after seven hours (and what felt like seven million tears), I had finally decided to make my life worth living. Today, I am a relatively happy individual. Obviously, as a teenager in high school, I still struggle with many different problems, but I know that I have the power to overcome them, and that makes all the difference. Had it not been for that FaceTime call, I don’t know where I would be or how I would feel today. I don’t even know if I would be alive. Jonna saved my life and made me want to save myself through FaceTime, using the power of communication via technology. Utilizing this power, no problem is too big to overcome. Anything is possible when you have access to resources across the world in a matter of minutes, and communication is the foundation that makes any problem fixable. This I believe.