13 Nov Favorite Site of the Week: To Write Love On Her Arms
Today is TWLOHA day… That’s To Write Love On Her Arms… and I had never heard of this group until a few hours ago when my lovely co-works HappyKatie and MagsMac called me to say they had something to show me they were sure I was going to love… cause anything with love… they know I will pretty much LOVE!
TWLOHA is my favorite site of the week not only because the cause is a pretty phenomenal one…
To Write Love on Her Arms is 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 also to invest directly into treatment and recovery.
It also has some of the most passionate and visceral writing I have come across. Their story is woven with pain, beauty, inspiration, despair and speaks to the true human condition and seeking of enlightenment, love, salvation, redemption…
She has known such great pain; haunted dreams as a child, the near-constant presence of evil ever since. She has felt the touch of awful naked men, battled depression and addiction, and attempted suicide. Her arms remember razor blades, fifty scars that speak of self-inflicted wounds. Six hours after I meet her, she is feeling trapped, two groups of “friends” offering opposite ideas. Everyone is asleep. The sun is rising. She drinks long from a bottle of liquor, takes a razor blade from the table and locks herself in the bathroom. She cuts herself, using the blade to write “FUCK UP” large across her left forearm…
She is full of contrast, more alive and closer to death than anyone I’ve known, like a Johnny Cash song or some theatre star. She owns attitude and humor beyond her 19 years, and when she tells me her story, she is humble and quiet and kind, shaped by the pain of a hundred lifetimes. I sit privileged but breaking as she shares. Her life has been so dark yet there is some soft hope in her words, and on consecutive evenings, I watch the prettiest girls in the room tell her that she’s beautiful. I think it’s God reminding her.
…and if you are looking to be inspired, touched, moved in anyway go read the whole thing and then find a friend to write love on your arm and take a pic and share it… and help the love movement grow.
Thanx Brandius for my Love Art!