COCOA, Fla. -- What started as a cause by a group of friends to help a 19-year-old woman who was addicted to drugs, suffering from depression and contemplating suicide has turned into a worldwide movement to aid others in similar situations.

"Two and a half years ago, I was completely lost," Renee Yohe said. "I was ready to end my life when I made that phone call."

Yohe is referring to a late-night phone call she made to a friend who brought along Jamie Tworkowski, a stranger to Yohe. They were planning on taking Yohe to a treatment center, but because of freshly inflicted razor blade wounds on her arms and drugs in her system, the facility would not allow her in for at least a week.

Yohe's friends stayed with her over the next five days, helping her out of her haze.

"And halfway through the five days I asked her this surprising question and expected the answer to be no and said, 'What do you think about telling your story?' And I didn't even know what that meant, where it would go, where it would lead to. And I figured she would say, 'Get lost, these are really private, vunerable things' and instead, she said she loved the possibility that there could be a purpose for her pain," Tworkowski said.

Tworkowski posted Yohe's story on MySpace and entitled it "To Write Love On Her Arms."

"She is full of contrast, more alive and closer to death than anyone I've know. Like a Johnny Cash song or some theatre star," Tworkowski posted on MySpace. "The sun is rising. She drinks long from a bottle of liquor, takes a razor blade from the kitchen table and locks herself in the bathroom. She cuts herself, sliding the blade to write (expletive) large across her left forearm.

"She hands me her last razor blade, tells me it is the one she used to cut her am and her last lines of cocaine five night before," the post continued. "I hold it carefully and thank her and know instantly that this moment, this gift, will stay with me."

"There was a sense that we were something like a spark, where we just opened the door and invited people into the conversation," Tworkowski said.

Tworkowski, a former surf company salesman, decided to print hundreds of T-shirts to help Yohe with the cost of rehab, which is when he came up with the idea for the name of the movement, saying love -- not the pain of her past -- should be on her arms.

"Really when things began to change is when some friends who play in bands and really spend their nights in front of large groups of people started to wear these shirts. People started to find out about it way outside of Central Florida, and we realized this story we were telling was connected to something much bigger," Tworkowski said.

"To Write Love On Her Arms," which now boasts a full-time staff that holds forums worldwide, talks to students at schools and puts on concerts, has the largest audience of any nonprofit organization on MySpace and Facebook. TWLOHA is consistently in the top 10 most-read blogs on the Internet and has raised nearly $250,000, all of which has been given to treatment and recovery centers.

More than 1,300 people recently visited Orlando's House of Blues to listen to the messages of hope, redemption and life.

"And from this humble bungalow has come a humongous worldwide response. In the short amount of time they have been in operation, they have received more than 90,000 responses from 40 different countries," Local 6 News reporter Donald Forbes said.

"We just want people to know they are not alone. We just want people to know it's OK to talk about this stuff," Tworkowski said. "We get to be in the business of better endings, believing stories deserve better endings."

Yohe, who has been sober for more than two years, has written her own book, "Purpose for the Pain."

"I guess that is what I live for. Because of the things that I went through and people that loved me through it, I have been on every side of the table now, and my heart is just for people. I just want give back what was so freely given to me," Yohe said.

For more information about TWLOHA, visit its Web site.