To Write Love on Her Arms (TWLOHA) is a campaign launched by Jamie Tworkowski in response to a friend, Renee, who at 19 was dealing with drug addiction, attempted suicide, and cutting. The campaign has grown into a full-fledged 501C-3 non-profit organization that captures the attention of thousands of young people across the nation who either deal with cutting themselves, or have problems with drug addiction and depression, or know of friends who have these problems. In one of the simplest and most viral of formats, this organization has taken off in the underground, but not through traditional forms of advertising and p.r., but via MySpace and T-shirt sales mostly and the support of musicians such as Thrice, UnderOath, Switchfoot, and Paramore, among others.
TWLOHA T-shirts will be sold also on various music tours this summer such as the Vans Warped Tour non-profit tent area with proceeds going towards expanding the educational and outreach programs that have grown with the organization.
What’s amazing about TWLOHA is that it brings to light real problems that many young people in America face today. Cutting, for example, or self injuries to inflict pain or to “feel alive” is often an attempt to calm or numb psychological pain or stress inside. Basically, a person injures the outside of themselves in an attempt to release the pain on the inside. Cutting was so not talked about in the past, mainly because a lot of young people were the victims of this practice and kept it quiet, that it was a mystery to many people including ways to treat it among health care professionals until celebrities such as Angelina Jolie and even Princess Diana talked about their own problems with cutting in their personal pasts.
In Renee’s case, at 19, she was already dealing with major addictions, which lead from a dark life and included making 50 cuts into her arms to mark the time of her struggles.
TWLOHA is also an example of how a cause started by one person can have incredible power to make change using non-traditional means. It’s movements like this that indicate the importance of cause-related word-of-mouth formats among young people, and the power of a simple and meaningful slogan on a T-shirt, for example, which through music and online formats, can spread a message beyond what most people even know exists. As Jamie describes on the TWLOHA site, this movement is about hope and love which for many young people, there’s a major lack thereof. As the site states, suicide is the 3rd leading cause of death among young people, and there are more suicides in Australia, New Zealand, and Japan than there are murders. That being said, TWLOHA has become a global youth culture movement.
This summer, if you see young people wearing To Write Love On Her Arms or Love is the Movement T-shirts, or have arms with messages written with pens and markers, you’ll know where the inspiration came from: one girl dealing with an all-too common problem and a friend that decided to do something about it. For more information go to www.twloha.com.
