We have conversations every day. We talk to our parents, our co-workers, our classmates, our roommates, our significant others, even ourselves. But how often do we have the difficult conversations? How often do we look directly into someone else’s eyes and ask, “Are you ok?” Or alternatively, when was the last time you looked directly into someone else’s eyes and said, “No, I’m not okay.”
Because I’ve been there too many times before, I can assume that it’s a rare occurrence for us to do so. To ask the hard questions. To have the hard conversations. That’s exactly what To Write Love On Her Arms founder Jamie Tworkowski invites anyone of all ages to do. To start a conversation, to have a conversation.
Jamie wrote a blog post for his friend, Renee Yohe, who entered a rehab facility for mental illness and addiction and it rapidly went viral. He made T-shirts with the logo printed on them and sold them to help pay for her treatment. And then? A movement was born. Fast forward eleven years and Tworkowski has established a successful non-profit and became a number one New York Times Bestseller for ‘If You Feel Too Much.”
“It is unspoken and there are only a few of us, but we will be her church, the body of Christ coming alive to meet her needs, to write love on her arms.”- Jamie Tworkowski
I found out about To Write Love On Her Arms when I was fourteen and a freshman in high school, through a celebrity, probably. It was 2010. As a little girl, I remember always straddling high tides of depression; these waves of sadness and despair that I didn’t know exactly how to place my finger on. Or how do deal with it constructively. It was normal for me. It still is. It used to leave scars.
Stumbling across To Write Love On Her Arms was finding light and hope. It was finding out what my passions were. It is what inspired me to write. By putting pen to paper, I was able to to have these honest and difficult conversations with myself. I discovered how I felt and things began to clear up for me for the first time. It gave me the confidence to share those things with the world and the world responded. The world gave back.
You’ll need coffee shops and sunsets and road trips. Airplanes and passports and new songs and old songs, but people more than anything else. You will need other people and you will need to be that other person to someone else, a living breathing screaming invitation to believe better things. -Jamie Tworkowski, Happy Birthday
Now here I am, seven years later. I was somehow blessed to have the opportunity to interview Jamie Tworkowski himself:
