First Chapter: She Forgot She Was Free by Giselle Mascarenhas

She Forgot She Was Free is an invitation to remember the woman you were before fear, expectations, achievement, disappointment, and survival convinced you to forget.

In this deeply personal and transformational book, two-time best-selling author and founder of The BECOME Method™, Giselle Mascarenhas, shares the lessons, questions, and revelations that led her back to her truest self. Rather than offering quick fixes or another self-help checklist, she invites readers into a journey of honest reflection, identity, healing, and intentional growth. Through compelling stories and practical insights, readers are challenged to release limiting beliefs, reconnect with their authentic voice, and rediscover the freedom that has been within them all along.

Rooted in the principles of The BECOME Method™, She Forgot She Was Free equips readers with a powerful way to move beyond simply surviving and begin living with clarity, courage, and purpose. Whether you’re navigating a season of transition, rebuilding after loss, or simply sensing there is more waiting for you, this book will remind you that the life you long for doesn’t begin by becoming someone new, it begins by remembering who you have always been.

Because the person you are searching for has never been lost.

She has simply been waiting for you to remember her.

╰┈➤Book Details 

● Title: She Forgot She Was Free: Returning to the Girl You Were Before the World Got Loud

● Author: Giselle Mascarenhas

● Genre: Self Help

● Sub-genre: Inner Child Self Help/Transformational Self Help/Motivational Self Help ● Language:English

● Pages: 132 ● Paperback ISBN: ‎ 979-8234125965

● ASIN: B0H6M1PSHT

● Publisher: Mija Media House

● Publication Date: June 23, 2026

● Price: Hardcover $37.99, Paperback $25.81, Kindle $9.99 ● Amazon: https://a.co/d/04aiKYWO

● Purchase Signed Copy: https://signedcopy.netlify.app/

First Chapter:

The Girl Who Played

She is still in there.

That is the first thing I need you to know before we go any further. Before the story. Before the lessons. Before any of it.

The girl you were before the world told you who to be , she didn’t leave. She just got quiet.

And this book is her invitation to come back.

I Remember Her

I was maybe two years old.

Pink leggings. A leotard. Little ballet shoes that I was probably too young to understand but wore like they were the most important thing I had ever put on my body. Which, at two, they were.

What I remember most isn’t the outfit. It’s my dad’s face.

The way he looked at me.

If you have ever been looked at like that, like you are someone’s entire reason for being in the room, you know there are no words for it. You just felt it. In your chest. In your bones. In the way your little body stood up straighter without anyone telling it to.

I was his princess. Not because I performed for it. Not because I earned it. Not because I was the prettiest or the smartest or the most well-behaved.

Just because I was me. And that was enough. That was more than enough. That was everything.

That feeling, that specific, this-is-what-it-means-to-be-fully-loved feeling, is what I have spent most of my life chasing without realizing I was chasing it. Because I already had it. It was already mine.

I just forgot.

Little Gi

People talk about their childhood like it was simple. Mine wasn’t simple. But it was full.

My parents split when I was young. My mom moved us from Dallas to McAllen. My dad stayed. And yet, I never once felt his absence like a wound. I felt him like a constant. Every summer in Dallas. Every holiday. Every weekend that I can hold in my memory, he was there. Present. Unambiguous in his love for me.

I know now that not every little girl gets that. I didn’t know it then. I just lived inside it.

And my mom, she was her own kind of love. Fierce. Devoted. Hers flowed most visibly toward my brother, and I remember watching that and feeling something that surprises me even now when I say it out loud:

I was happy for him.

I loved how my mom loved my brother. I didn’t compete with it. I didn’t shrink from it. I just turned a quiet little switch inside myself and let it be what it was. He needed her in a way that I didn’t, or maybe in a way I had already learned not to show. Either way, I had enough. I was loved. I knew it.

That switch, the one that could just click off so someone else could have the light, I thought it was a gift.

I didn’t know yet that I would spend decades using it on myself.

The Eye. The Hospital. The Thing About Being Loved.

When I was five, my eye had been doing something that felt like an adventure to me and apparently looked alarming to everyone else. A little lazy eye that wandered when I chewed or ate. The kids at school had thoughts about it. Dr. Hamilton, and yes, I still remember his name, which tells you everything about how significant this moment was, was the surgeon who was going to fix it.

I did not want to go to that hospital.

I was stubborn about the needles in the way that only a five-year-old who has never been told no can be. I was vocal. I was dramatic. I was convinced that none of this was necessary.

But here is what I remember more than the fear:

The love.

My grandmother. My aunts and uncles. My cousins. My mom and my dad, together, in that room, around me. Love from every direction. Love so thick you could almost hold it.

I was five years old in a hospital scared out of my mind and I felt like the most important person in the world.

That is what unconditional love does to a child. It writes itself into her body like a first language. She may forget the words later. But some part of her will always recognize the feeling when it comes back.

The Plays

Kinder through fifth grade, I was known for one thing above everything else:

I made people feel alive.

Not because I performed. Not because I was the star. But because I was the one who looked at everyone around me and saw what they were made of, and then built something so they could step into it.

I curated plays. I choreographed dances. I cast everyone in the role that was theirs, not the role they asked for, but the role I could see was waiting inside them. I hand-picked every part. Not to show off. Not to be in charge. But because something in me, something I now understand was my actual purpose, could see the genius in people before they saw it in themselves.

And when they stepped into what I had created for them?

They came alive.

That was the pattern. That was always the pattern. I just didn’t have language for it yet. I was just little Gi, doing what felt natural. What felt free.

There was no performance in it. No strategy. No hustle.

Just a little girl creating magic for the people she loved, and watching them bloom inside it.

I see now that this is where my purpose was born. Right there. In the make shift practices. In the school hallway. In the casting of the play nobody asked me to produce.

I was always an experience architect. I just didn’t know that’s what it was called.

Beat It

If you grew up in the 80s, you understand what Michael Jackson meant.

Not as a celebrity. Not as a pop star. As a feeling.

My bedroom walls were covered in him. Floor to ceiling. Every page I could tear from every magazine that had his face on it, I put it up. I would climb on my dresser drawers and stand on chairs just to reach higher, just to fit one more. My brother John knew this. And because brothers are built to find the exact thing that will undo you, ripping one of those pictures was his most effective weapon. That was the deal, unspoken but understood, touch my Michael Jackson pictures and I stop raiding your Little Debbies and cereal. We had a whole economy built around it.

But Michael Jackson wasn’t just decoration on my walls.

He was proof that you could be fully, completely, unapologetically yourself, and the whole world would not just accept it, they would lose their minds over it.

Third grade. The school talent show.

I signed up to dance to Beat It. I borrowed a dress. Black tights that were slightly too small. I was not nervous. Not even a little. I was a great dancer and I loved Michael Jackson and the combination of those two facts felt like more than enough reason to get on a stage in front of the entire school.

When the music started, I stopped thinking.

I just danced.

I hit every move. I got lost in it, the way you only get lost in something when you are doing exactly what you were made to do. No performance. No awareness of being watched. Just a little girl and the music and the complete and total freedom of a body that knew what it was doing.

When it was over, the cafeteria stood up.

The whole cafeteria.

Elementary kids on their feet, cheering, for me, for little Gi who had just danced her whole heart out in slightly-too-small tights without a single moment of self-consciousness.

I remember that feeling. I want you to feel it with me for just a second before I tell you what happened next.

That feeling, of being fully yourself, fully alive, and being met with that kind of love, that is vitality. That is exactly what this book is about. Not the applause. The aliveness that came before it.

I signed up again the following year.

I was going to dance again. At this point I was certain, certain, that I was either going to be a ballroom dancer or a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader. It was not even a question in my mind. It was just a matter of which one.

Then I got called to the principal’s office.

Mrs. Champion sat across from me and told me that before I could perform in the talent show, I would need to audition privately for her. Because last year, she said, and I still remember her tone more clearly than her words, my dance moves had been vulgar. And I would not be allowed to perform if I did anything like that again.

I was in third grade.

I did not fully understand the word she used. But I understood her face. I understood the disgust in it. The way she looked at me like my aliveness, my joy, my freedom, the very thing that had made every child in that cafeteria rise to their feet, was something to be ashamed of. Something that needed to be contained. Auditioned. Approved before it was allowed to exist.

I went back to my homeroom teacher and told her I had decided not to perform.

She asked why.

I just don’t want to anymore, I said.

And I sat down.

I did not have the language for what had just happened to me. I did not know that a grown woman had just looked at a little girl on fire and made her feel like her flame was a problem. I did not know that the thing I did most naturally, the thing that made people come alive, had just been handed back to me with a note that said too much.

What I knew was the feeling in my body.

The same body that had been lost in the music, free and uncalculating, was now sending a different signal. A warning. A familiar click.

When the light shines too bright on you, move it.

Point it somewhere else before someone decides your brightness is the problem. Before they call it vulgar. Before your heart gets shattered by someone else’s discomfort with your aliveness.

I had already learned the light switch. Mrs. Champion just gave me the first real reason to use it.

The Light Switch

There is something I need to tell you about the guilt.

My dad loved me in a way he did not love my brother. Or my half-brothers. He showed up for me in a way he did not show up for them. I felt that. I saw that. And as a little girl who loved the people around her, I learned something that would follow me like a shadow for decades:

Turn off the light so others don’t feel the dark.

If my love, my attention, my gifts, my being chosen, was causing pain for someone else, the answer was to dim myself. To make myself smaller. To be grateful quietly instead of out loud. To receive love in private so no one else had to witness what they didn’t have.

I thought this was kindness.

And in some ways, it was.

But it was also the beginning of a pattern I would repeat over and over again in my life, in friendships, in relationships, in business, in rooms full of people who needed something from me. The pattern of making myself the environment for everyone else while forgetting to live inside my own life.

The light switch. Click. Gone.

I didn’t know yet what it would cost me.

The Last Free Morning

The summer before sixth grade, something happened to my body that I was completely unprepared for.

I grew up.

Not in the way I mean now when I talk about growth, the intentional, God-led, identity-rooted kind. I mean physically. Literally. The ugly duckling became something else entirely over the course of one summer, and I walked into the first day of sixth grade as a different-looking person than the one who had walked out of fifth grade.

I didn’t know it yet. And then I did.

The boys did a double take. The girls scowled. Something shifted in the air.

And then my best friend, J.V., my best friend since we were five years old, threw her gym bag on the ground and looked at me with a fire I had never seen in her before.

“Giselle. Pick it up.”

I remember the pause. The way my body took a second to catch up with what was happening. And then something moved through me that I had never felt before in quite that way.

Power.

Not the warm, generous power of little Gi casting her friends in the perfect roles. Something different. Something that the world had just handed me without asking if I wanted it.

I said no. I walked away. J.V. and I didn’t speak for years.

And just like that, in a single morning, in a single moment, in the space between throwing a bag and walking away from it, I stopped being the girl who played.

I became the girl who performed.

What I Know Now

I am writing this for you.

Not the you who has it all together. Not the you who shows up polished and prepared and ready to be seen. I am writing this for the you who is exhausted, bone tired in the specific way that comes not from doing too much but from being someone other than yourself for too long.

I know that tired.

I lived in it for years while building beautiful things for other people. While turning myself into the environment so everyone else could feel at home. While clicking that light switch off again and again until I couldn’t quite remember where I’d put the ON.

But here is what I need you to hear before we go any further:

You are not broken. You are not lost. You are not too far gone.

You are just a woman who forgot she was free.

And the girl who knew, the one in the ballet shoes, the one casting the plays, the one who loved so openly and lived so fully before the world got loud,

She has been waiting this whole time.

Not to be rescued.

Just to be remembered.

A Note Before You Turn the Page

Somewhere in your life there is a version of you that existed before the performance began.

Before you learned that love had conditions. Before you discovered that being seen came with a cost. Before you picked up the gym bag.

She has a memory that is hers. A place. A smell. A feeling in her body that she has never been able to fully describe but has never fully forgotten either.

That is where we are going.

Not forward.

Back.

Giselle Mascarenhas is the founder of BECOME™, creator of the BECOME Methodology™, and author of She Forgot She Was Free. An entrepreneur, speaker, and transformational guide, she has dedicated her life’s work to helping people reconnect with who they were created to be so they can live with greater purpose, freedom, and intentionality.

After years of building businesses, leading organizations, and walking through seasons of personal growth, Giselle recognized that lasting transformation does not begin with external success, it begins with remembering one’s authentic identity. That realization became the foundation of the BECOME Method™, a proprietary methodology designed to guide individuals through a transformational process of self-awareness, healing, alignment, courageous action, and embodied growth. Unlike a framework that offers guidelines for achieving a specific outcome, The BECOME Method™ is a comprehensive method of personal advancement that can be applied across every area of life, leadership, and purpose.

Her debut book, She Forgot She Was Free, is both a deeply personal memoir and an invitation for readers to embark on their own journey of remembrance. Through honest storytelling, reflection, and faith, the book explores the universal experience of losing ourselves beneath expectations, fear, pain, and performance, and the courageous journey of rediscovering the freedom, identity, and purpose that have always existed within us. Rather than simply telling her story, Giselle invites readers to see themselves in its pages and begin writing the next chapter of their own lives.

The book became the catalyst for the broader BECOME movement, an expanding ecosystem of transformational experiences designed to help people move beyond inspiration into intentional action. Through immersive workshops, retreats, leadership development, educational programs, community experiences, publishing initiatives, and speaking engagements, Giselle equips individuals with practical tools to create meaningful and lasting transformation. Every experience is grounded in the belief that personal growth is not about becoming someone different but remembering and embodying the person God uniquely created each of us to be.

Known for her ability to blend heartfelt storytelling with practical application, Giselle creates spaces where people feel seen, challenged, and empowered to take meaningful action. Her presentations combine vulnerability, strategic thinking, and actionable guidance, allowing audiences to leave not only inspired but equipped with a clear path forward. Her work resonates with entrepreneurs, leaders, professionals, educators, faith-based communities, and individuals seeking deeper purpose and authentic fulfillment.

Beyond her work as an author and speaker, Giselle is passionate about developing leaders who create ripple effects within their families, businesses, organizations, and communities. She believes transformation is contagious, that when one person remembers who they are and chooses to live courageously, they give others permission to do the same. This philosophy continues to shape every initiative within the BECOME movement.

Through future books, collaborative publishing projects, leadership academies, retreats, and global speaking engagements, Giselle’s mission is to help millions of people reconnect with their God-given identity and become the fullest expression of who they were created to be. She envisions BECOME as a worldwide movement that empowers individuals to live intentionally, lead authentically, and create lasting impact for generations to come.

Giselle lives in Texas with her family and continues to write, teach, speak, and expand the global reach of the BECOME movement. Whether on stage, in the pages of a book, or through transformational experiences, her message remains the same: the person you are searching for has never been lost, you have simply forgotten who you are. Remember. Rise. BECOME.

Visit her website at www.thebecomemethod.com.

Connect with her on social media at:

╰┈➤Twitter: https://x.com/giselleempowers

╰┈➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/giselleempowers

╰┈➤Instagram: https://instagram.com/giselleempowers

╰┈➤Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/21957760.Giselle_Mascarenhas

               

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