Genre: Self Help
Sub-genre: Inner Child Self Help/Transformational Self Help/Motivational Self Help
Publisher: Mija Media House
Publication Date: June 23, 2026
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.
Excerpt
“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.
– Excerpted from She Forgot She Was Free by Giselle Mascarenhas, Mija Media House, 2026. Reprinted with permission.
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