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“I had been cutting myself since I was 18 but it got worse in my early 20’s. Jessie’s story is not one that fits easily into “before” and “after” boxes. Behind the physical act and scars, there are emotional and spiritual scars,” shares Jessie.
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I don’t think people realize that self-injury is an addiction that kills you from the inside out. I didn’t really want to stop- I wasn’t really in the place to be fighting it. I was still in the midst of my own journey (with self-injury). I thought it was awesome and I ended up buying a shirt. “I was at Cornerstone in Orlando when Jamie came on stage before (the band) Paramore and explained Renee’s story. Bands grab hold of the story and the t-shirts, and soon MySpace and Facebook are flooded with stories – stories of people who feared that they were alone, broken beyond repair, so filled with self-loathing that there was no way back. Their sale and the interest generated from Jamie’s writing of Renee’s story will fund Renee’s recovery but it will also birth a movement. There is a literal cost to treatment and no one has the money to send Renee, so they print t-shirts and take them to nearby Orlando. 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.”
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We become her hospital and the possibility of healing fills our living room with life. As Jamie Tworkowski, founder of To Write Love on Her Arms, writes on their website, “For the next five days, she is ours to love. She was trapped in addiction but the treatment center saw her visible wounds of self-injury and deemed her too great a risk. In 2006, Renee was living in Cocoa and caught in a no man’s land.
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