"We didn't have an office, Lauren and I were working out of our house, Jamie was working out of his condo and Trisha with her laptop in her apartment in NYC. After volunteering for the organization and fielding emails that came in through the MySpace page, Ranzio became a full-time employee in November 2006 along with Trisha, Tworkowski's girlfriend at the time, and Lauren, who would later marry Ranzio. Ranzio had grown up in the same church as Tworkowski, and learned about TWLOHA shortly after the blog post was published. "Because of the T-shirt sales, I knew we could do more than just help Renee." The non-profit now estimates about 10,000 shirts were sold in 2006.īy the end of that year, the group hired a few employees, one of whom was David Ranzio. Two months later, Tworkowski quit his job to work full-time on TWLOHA. The shirts became available to order online shortly after. Jon Foreman, a friend of Tworkowski's who happened to be a member of the popular alternative rock band Switchfoot, wore the first TWLOHA T-shirt on March 30, 2006. This was before Kickstarter and GoFundMe, and so Tworkowski then began printing and selling T-shirts with the title of the blog post, "To Write Love On Her Arms" to help fund Yohe's treatment. The blog post began to spread, first among friends and then across the web, especially after Relevant Magazine, a Christian publication for twenty- and thirtysomethings, included it in an email blast. We start with the basics lots of fun, too much Starbucks, and way too many cigarettes." As he writes in the blog post, "I’ve never walked this road, but I decide that if we’re going to run a five-day rehab, it is going to be the coolest in the country. So Tworkowski and his friends took her home and watched over for her for those five days. The facility agreed to admit her if she remained clean and sober for five days. When she turned to Tworkowski's friend David for help to get her into a rehab facility, they found the rehab wouldn't take her after classifying her as "high-risk" because of the fresh self-inflicted wound on her arm. Tworkowski was 26 and working as a sales rep for Hurley when he met Yohe, a 19-year-old friend of a friend who was battling drug addiction and self-harm. "First off, I wrote the story just for myself, just to try to capture and remember the conversations we had and what was a really moving experience for me, because I had never had an experience like that before," Tworkowski, the non-profit's founder, told me recently. Or, I guess you could stay it started when Yohe met Jamie Tworkowski, and he and his friends helped her through her drug detox - and then it really started when Tworkowski wrote a blog post about the experience titled "To Write Love On Her Arms." It all started with a girl named Renee Yohe, who would eventually be played by Kat Dennings in the 2012 film about the movement. Looking back at their origins, and their success, is an interesting case study in how just talking about mental health issues openly can inspire a lot of hope. And in many ways, TWLOHA can be seen as maybe the first grassroots viral awareness campaign, a sort of pre-cursor to the social media activism we have today. From #freethenipple to #HeForShe, hashtags make headlines, and even make headway for their cause. With the rise of Twitter, Facebook, and other powerful social media platforms, it seems like there's a new hashtag campaign for a cause every week. Since it was created in the spring of 2006, To Write Love On Her Arms has become an official non-profit that's given more than $1.5 million to mental health organizations, and sold 48,000 of their now iconic T-shirts, tanks, and sweats in 2015 alone. Yep, TWLOHA didn't just make its mark on Myspace and LiveJournal - it's survived on Facebook and Tumblr, too. This month marks 10 years since those first social posts started, and you might be surprised to know that the message is still spreading across the web. I would've thought it was a band, if not for the dreamy images I sometimes stumbled across on social media (which back then consisted only of MySpace and LiveJournal), captioned "To Write Love On Her Arms," urging the reader to remember that they weren't alone if they were feeling depressed or suicidal, or if they were battling drug addiction. Like a lot of millennials my age, To Write Love On Her Arms is a vague memory of my high school experience, one that conjures images of girls with thick black eyeliner and boys who wore fuzzy sweatbands bought at Hot Topic.
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