Girl, Wash Your Face: Stop Believing the Lies About Who You Are So You Can Become Who You Were Meant to Be

The summary

The things you believe hold you back — that you’re not good enough, won’t land the dream job, can’t have a great marriage or a good sex life, aren’t a good mom — are lies you’ve been telling yourself. They feel like verdicts, but they’re mostly inherited stories, and everyone has the power to take control of their life and reach their goals once they stop treating the stories as fact.

Self-respect is built from promises you keep

Picture a friend who swears she’ll go running with you every evening and then bails at the last minute because something good is on TV. You’d lose patience with her fast. Now notice how often you do exactly that to yourself. Every promise you break to yourself teaches your mind that you can’t be trusted, and self-respect quietly erodes. Keeping those promises does the opposite: it builds self-respect and trains you to hit bigger targets later. The trick is to make the promises realistic and start small, honoring little commitments before you take on the large ones. Each one you keep becomes proof you can keep the next.

Rejection is information, not a verdict

People will doubt you — parents, friends, colleagues — but the only person who has to believe in you is you. When no publisher would take Hollis’s first novel, Party Girl, without changes she couldn’t accept, she self-published it herself, and it became a success. The “no” wasn’t a judgment on her worth; it was a mismatch she refused to let define her. Success also takes patience. Julia Child spent a decade writing Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and James Cameron took fifteen years to make Avatar. Most people quit before the waiting is over, mistaking slow progress for failure.

Your body and your sex life reflect the lies too

Self-image issues quietly wreck intimacy. Many women spend sex worrying about their supposed flaws, when the truth is their partner isn’t cataloging imperfections — he’s simply thrilled to be there. Hollis fought this with positive self-talk, repeating that she was sexy until she believed it, and she pushed back on the assumption that women shouldn’t expect to orgasm. Make climaxing the goal, she argues, and a loving partner will happily rise to it. One experiment she suggests is having sex every day for a month, which invites experimentation and turns up new things you enjoy; she was surprised to find her husband wanted it even more afterward.

The same clear-eyed honesty applies to health. Your weight doesn’t define your identity, but if it’s genuinely unhealthy, you should work to change it, and the mechanics are simple: burn more calories than you consume. Two practical moves help more than willpower. Edit your social media and unfollow anyone selling unrealistic beauty standards, and prepare rigorously — cook your healthy meals for the week in one sitting, lay out your workout clothes in advance. And stop measuring yourself against other people, a habit that guarantees misery. The only useful comparison is to who you were yesterday.

Chaos isn’t failure

Life breaks down at the worst moments — the dryer dies on laundry day, the heat quits on a freezing night. These aren’t signs you’ve failed; they’re the inevitable fallout of circumstances beyond your control. The mistake is treating chaos as a referendum on your competence and then despairing. Instead, embrace it. Laugh at the absurdity, and accept help, no matter how small the offer. Fighting the current only wears you out.

Widen your world and make the goal tangible

A rich life needs people who aren’t like you. Hollis grew up sheltered in a small, conservative, religious town, and a childhood trip to Disneyland stunned her — she stared at the variety of people as if she were at a zoo. Now one of her closest friends, an African-Mexican American gay woman, has taught her to recognize her own unconscious biases and learn from other people’s stories. If life were a book, it would be unbearably dull with every character the same. Building a supportive, diverse community is both the right thing and the way you grow.

Then give your ambition something concrete to chase. Vague goals don’t move anyone; the more tangible and detailed the target, the harder your mind pulls toward it, so try to feel what reaching it will be like. Hollis promised herself a Louis Vuitton purse the day she billed a client $10,000 in consulting fees. The purse was specific, visible, and easy to picture, and that clarity kept her focused and driven.

The bottom line

Self-respect comes from keeping small promises to yourself, refusing to accept other people’s doubt, and recognizing that most of your limits are inherited stories rather than truths. Read this if you’re stuck believing you’re not capable of more.