Cover image of blonde-haired woman sitting on the floor by a spewing yellow fire hydrant

Lately, I have been taken with books by young female dynamos: Tami Lahren’s Never Play Dead captivated me in August, and now I have a new one to share: Girl, Wash Your Face by Rachel Hollis.

In both cases, I had not heard of these media personalities before. They were not people I followed nor had really come across in the media I read, watch or listen to. Goes to show there is always more to be discovered!

Again, the book cover caught my eye in a bookstore. This time, I was browsing the Valparaiso University bookstore after visiting the Brauer Museum of Art on the same campus.

Side note: that’s one thing I like to do, especially for artist dates: visit a university art museum.

I have stumbled upon amazing treasures on visits to university art museums:

Rust Red Hills by Georgia O’Keefe, 1930
Brauer Museum of Art, Valparaiso University, Indiana

I certainly didn’t expect to find a stunning Georgia O’Keefe painting in a little campus museum in northwestern Indiana!

Treasures can be found. You just have to go looking!

Back to Rachel Hollis’s book: The cover with the spewing yellow fire hydrant and the wet-faced, blonde-haired woman beside it beckoned from a shelf at the Valparaiso University bookstore. As I leafed through it, I spotted phrases such as:

THINGS THAT HELPED ME:

I stopped reading reviews.

I write for myself.

Boxed wine.

Intriguing! I’m not into boxed wine, (In fact, last night I brought a 3-liter box of wine I’d been gifted to my memoir class as my husband and I would never finish it.), but I thought:

Here’s someone with spunk and attitude, someone who’s willing to write down and share what’s actually going on in her life.

And so I bought Girl, Wash Your Face, and read it in two days. Clearly, I was entertained; I was taken by her voice. I loved her candor, and I found several of her insights stuck in my head. She sets out to debunk lies women tell themselves, and I am sure many men do, too. I am actually not so much into her approach of addressing only women, but that’s again a side note. I found many, many phrases to underline, and so I’ll share some:

Your life is supposed to be a journey from one unique place to another; it’s not supposed to be a merry-go-round that brings you back to the same spot over and over again.

p. yv

Not that I hadn’t heard this before. It mirrors the famous saying, commonly attributed to Albert Einstein: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.”

But it never hurts to hear it again, put in a different way!

I love who I am even when I do things I’m not proud of.. it’s possible because I know I am ultimately in control of making change…

p. yvi

the gift of life is that we get another chance tomorrow… Life isn’t meant to be merely survived–it’s meant to be lived.

p.4

I figured out what makes me happy and I do those things.

p.8

Duh, right? Plain truth spoken!

You are in charge of your own life, sister, and there’s not one thing in it that you’re not allowing to be there. Think about it.

p. 9

The idea of doing nothing makes my skin crawl.

p.18

Mine, too! Well, I wouldn’t put it that way but yes,

learning to do nothing has been super hard for me.

No matter how many times I’ve stepped off the workaholic hamster wheel, I somehow always find myself back on. And then I have to relearn to step off (see Learning to Pace Myself.).

Says Rachel Hollis:

Learning to rest is an ongoing process.

p. 30

Indeed it is.

…your reality is colored much more by your past experiences than by what is actually happening to you.

p. 59

Her chapter on “I should be further along by now” – the soul- and creativity-killing human propensity to compare ourselves to others – really resonated with me.

We’re focusing all of our attention on the absence of something.

p. 105

God has perfect timing, and it’s highly possible that by not being where you thought you should be, you will end up exactly where you’re meant to go.

p. 110

Big dreams shouldn’t have expiration dates. As long as you’re working towards the things you hope to accomplish, it shouldn’t matter if it takes you a month or a decade.

p. 111

There is so much more I could share from this book. I particularly appreciated that Rachel Hollis, like Tami Lahren, has a sense of God in her life, a higher power in the world. While her religion isn’t mine, I share that faith in God. Thus I find it hard to accept advice and insights from someone, who doesn’t have a sense of us humans not having all the answers.

This is the second time I am impressed with a book by a woman much younger than me, who has many wise things to say, who is a force to be reckoned with, but who also believes in God. It is refreshing, and it is hopeful.