Overseas friends help her win depression battle
For her birthday this year, Michaela Jones asked her mom for a passport so that she can begin traveling abroad.
“I struggled with depression in high school. I was bullied. I was having problems with my family. It was all really weighing me down. So my counselor referred me to this website where I could talk to people. It’s this one-on-one thing where you type in the topic you want to talk about and it matches you with people dealing with similar issues. I did it a couple times over a few weeks, and I began meeting some really good people. Then we decided to get off the website and continue communicating on our own. Through that, I developed some great friendships with people all over the world. I discovered that it’s easy to talk to someone overseas because they have no connection with the people around you. So talking with them about your problems, you don’t have to worry that it’s going to come back to bite you later.
“One of my friends lives in Portsmouth, England. Another lives in Australia. I have a friend who’s a soldier from Canada, and he’s in Israel right now. Then I have another friend from England who’s in France right now. We talk on Skype all the time. Sometimes we send each other packages. We’re all different ages, but I can honestly say that I feel close to these people.
“The whole experience has really opened my eyes. We may seem different, but in many ways we’re very much the same. They may live in another part of the world, but they deal with the same problems that we do.”
— Michaela Jones
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