The Story

Founder of 'To Write Love on Her Arms' visits William and Mary

Feb. 8, 2010 | By Katelin Hill, DSJ Staff Reporter

Jamie Tworkowski met Renee Yohe for the first time in 2006. Renee was addicted to cocaine and was living in a house of drug dealers and users. When Jamie and friend David McKenna extended an offer to help her, Renee said she needed some time to think. But Renee decided that she would trust Jamie. They took her to a clinic in Florida, where she was denied admission for the drugs in her system and the open wounds on her forearm, branded as too "high risk," and told to come back sober in five days. That wasn't the end of it for Renee- with Jamie, David, and a few other friends' help, they spent the next five days helping Renee come back to life as she removed the drugs from her system.

Jamie Tworkowski would soon become the founder of To Write Love On Her Arms, a non-profit movement dedicated to presenting hope and finding help for people struggling with depression, addiction, self-injury and suicide. TWLOHA exists to encourage, inform, inspire and invest directly into treatment and recovery. Jamie visited William and Mary on Thursday, February 4th at an event hosted by AMP to speak to the students and spread his message.

"It was my first time seeing her and you just got a sense of this weight, of this confusion," said Jamie about meeting Renee. "It was really difficult to leave her that night. She went back to a group of people who were basically saying the opposite, that we weren't her friends and didn't know." After they left that night, Renee took a blade to her left forearm and wrote 'fuck up.'

But Renee did take the first step and went to the clinic, only to be told that she had to come back clean in five days. The next five days they spent together in Jamie and David's apartment, buying Renee coffee and cigarettes, going to concerts and talking.

"I've never had an experience like that," said Jamie. "I felt like she was such a unique girl and had a lot of life in her. I asked her this very vulnerable question, 'How do you feel about telling your story?’ She loved the idea that maybe there could be a purpose to her pain."

Jamie wrote a couple of pages about their past few days and entitled it "To Write Love on Her Arms." Soon after Jamie was at a Coldplay concert. He described how moved he felt, in a crowd of thousands of people, listening to songs like "Fix You," and "Yellow."

"Somehow I walked out of the concert thinking, we'll sew the funny words on a shirt," he said. "The shirt will be black because Coldplay was wearing black, and the words should be white because Coldplay was wearing white shoes."

And from there, it was history. The momentum of the movement began with bands like Switchfoot and Anberlin promoting the website and wearing the shirts at their concerts. Jamie said that after a show, the TWLOHA website or Myspace would have comment after comment by people at the concerts.

"No matter what circle you grow up in, how much money your parents make, what you watch on TV, as a country we have a hard time talking about our pain and our struggles," said Jamie. "To me it is becoming very apparent that we weren't intended to take life alone. It goes a lot better when we allow others to see us."

Since the website was started, the members of TWLOHA have answered over 150,000 messages, have connected countless people with help, and have invested $700,000 into treatment.

Jamie encouraged everyone in need to take the first step and get help if they need it. During the presentation he invited a friend onstage with him to talk. Her name is Nicole Orsagos, and she was the girlfriend of an old coworker of Jamie's, named Zeke Sanders. Zeke had committed suicide just weeks before Jamie met Renee, and it was an experience that first had Jamie thinking about how he could help others. Nicole told the audience about her experience dealing with the aftermath of Zeke's suicide. She recalled driving up to her first counseling session and sitting in the car, preparing herself to make the first step and talk to someone.

Jamie said a lot of people have asked him how his team does not collapse under the weight of these issues. Jamie responded that while there are parts of their job that they will never get used to, like a suicide letter recently sent to them, they know that many more lives have been saved.

"We get to see the flip side, and we get to see it pretty often," Jamie said.

Currently TWLOHA has just received $100,000 from the Chase Community Giving contest. The money will go towards the organization's newest project, an online crisis network run by a staff fully trained in crisis intervention, which will be called IMAlive. Jamie said that research shows people are less scared of getting help if the first step isn't necessarily face-to-face.

As Jamie wrapped up the conversation, he told the audience that he is currently taking antidepressants. He said that he wasn't saying it for sympathy, but to send the message that "it's okay."

"It's real," he said. "It's in the room. It's okay to talk about it."