To Write Love On Her Arms, a three-year tribute to Renee Yohe

In 2006, Jamie Tworkowski met nineteen year old Renee Yohe, Cocaine fresh in her system. She had not slept in thirty-six hours, and would not for another twenty-four. Her life was a blur of coke, pot, pills and alcohol.

Six hours after Jamie met Renee, she was feeling trapped between two groups of her so called friends offering opposite ideas. So in the early morning, as she drank from a bottle of liquor, she takes a razor from the table and locks herself in the bathroom. She cuts herself mercilessly using the shiny piece of metal to scratch obscenities into her skin.

When she goes to the rehabilitation center, they find the wounds. They have no detox, and name her too great a risk to keep so they do not accept her. For the next five days, Jamie and his group of friends take her in. She is theirs to love.

On her last night before entering rehab, she hands Jamie her last razor blade, tells him it was the one she used to cut her arm and her last lines of cocaine five nights prior.

During the whole week Renee spent with Jamie and his friends, they made T-shirts to raise money for her treatment. They called their fundraiser, “To Write Love on Her Arms.” Jamie later posted Renee’s story on the ever popular online community called Myspace. He soon got reactions from thousands or possibly millions of people saying that Renee’s story was inspiring to them.

The story I’ve just told you is the beginning of the now large organization, To Write Love on Her Arms. To some people, this program is ‘sort of a safe place for people who don’t have love in their life. They need a voice or shelter to protect them and to help them through everything that has happened to them or hurt them.’ To others, ‘it stands for love – loving people without it, letting them know that they’re not alone and that there is hope.’

I’ve been reading long and hard on TWLOHA’s vision and what their goals are. They say their goal is for people to realize they were created to love and to be loved; that they were meant to live life in relationship with other people; to know and be known.

I chose to do my research paper on this program because it’s just an amazing story to be told. It proves that people do go through hard times, and it shows that there is hope for the hopeless, and people love the unloved. Love can change a life, and we can hold back the darkness.

Some people say there is no such thing as suicide prevention. To Write Love on Her Arms is an attempt to prove them wrong. People are willing to step in and help; to love people, and to guide them through their hard times.

Statistics say that suicide is the third leading cause of death in young adults. Untreated depression is the number one cause for suicide. Also, other untreated mental illnesses such as, but not limited to bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and others, is the cause for the vast majority of suicide.

The aforementioned mental disorders are also contributors to drug addiction. Some people use drug addiction to deny, cope with, or hide an underlying psychological disorder.

To Write Love on Her Arms is about depression, cutting, suicide, and addiction. It’s about talking about things that haven’t been talked about and meeting those needs of depressed people. It’s about broken people, it’s about being broken, and regret, but most importantly it’s about hope.

Renee has been quoted saying this. “This isn’t the easiest thing you’ll ever have to do. I mean, you have to change everything. But with that, new things are going to come in place that are better than anything you’ve thought you’ve ever had. Like when people are holding on to the vices, these things that we think, ‘this is all I’ll ever have’ but you know there’s something so much better than that if you’re willing to do the work to get it.”

I know that life isn’t going to get easier for anyone, but it’s going to become so much simpler. It’s not life that gets easier, but it’s about finding new solutions to your problems to make them easier.

When Renee was asked what she would say if her story was told, she responded, “Tell them to look up. Tell them to remember the stars.” So I end my report on this note. Remember the stars.

Sources are:
www.twloha.com
wikipedia.org
socialvibe.com