I’m happy to welcome Gisele Mascarenehas. Today, Gisele shares ten things she wishes she could tell her younger self, along with her new release, She Forgot She Was Free.
Here’s Gisele!
At 53, I don’t think wisdom means having life figured out.
I think it means being able to look back at the beautiful parts, the painful parts, the things you wish you had done differently and the things you wouldn’t change for anything, and finally see how all of it belongs.
Here are ten things life has taught me that I wish I could whisper to the little girl I once was.
1. Take the scenic route.
My dad was a dreamer. He taught me to meditate, to find joy in ordinary moments and not to take life so seriously.
But one of the things I remember most is that he loved the scenic route.
I understand that differently now.
We spend so much of our lives rushing toward the destination that we miss our actual lives happening along the way.
My dad also taught me to hold hands and mean it.
Be there. Feel it. Look around. Take the long way sometimes.
The view matters.
2. Forgiveness is more for your healing than theirs.
This one took me years to understand.
I used to think forgiveness meant saying what happened was okay.
It doesn’t.
Forgiveness allowed me to stop requiring someone else to change, apologize or understand my pain before I gave myself permission to heal.
Some relationships get repaired.
Some don’t.
You can still choose peace.
3. The right love gives you wings.
Ruben gives me wings.
That’s the simplest way I know to describe loving my husband.
His love doesn’t make me smaller. It doesn’t require me to become less of myself so he can feel like more of himself.
His love feels like I can fly.
I think that’s what beautiful love does.
It doesn’t become your wings.
It reminds you that you already have them.
4. Your children will raise you too.
I thought I was going to raise my children.
And of course I did.
But John and Gianna raised parts of me too.
They taught me selflessness. Compassion. Responsibility. They exposed parts of me that needed growing and gave me reasons to become a better human.
Children have this incredible ability to become mirrors.
Sometimes you love what you see.
Sometimes you don’t.
Both can change you.
5. Presence is one of the greatest gifts you can give someone.
My grandchildren, my nuggets, Zen and Zy, gave me a second chance at something.
I wasn’t always the most reliable, completely present human when my children were little. I can acknowledge that now without living in shame about it.
But with my nuggets, I get another opportunity.
When I’m with them, I’m WITH them.
Not my phone.
Not an email.
Not work.
Them.
We play. We laugh. And somehow, when I’m completely present with them, I feel like a kid again too.
Maybe that’s one of the gifts of getting older.
You realize presence was the thing everyone needed all along.
6. Love people the way you want to be loved.
For most of my life, I didn’t have the kind of deeply reciprocal female friendships I have today.
Now I have sisters.
Women who see me. Show up. Pray with me. Laugh with me. Tell me the truth. Let me do the same for them.
And I have realized something.
The more I lead with the kind of love I want to receive, the more that kind of love finds me.
I treasure my sisters because I now understand friendship isn’t measured by how long someone has known you.
Sometimes it’s measured by how deeply someone is willing to know you.
7. Success begins long before anyone else can see it.
Success begins in your heart and in your head.
Your thoughts are constantly shaping your identity, and your identity shapes how you move through the world.
I spent years believing success was something I could point to.
A business. A title. An accomplishment. Something I built.
At 53, I work every day to allow God to be the only idol in my life.
I still love building. I still dream BIG.
I just don’t want what I build to become what I worship.
8. Money comes and goes. Don’t let your aliveness go with it.
Money has taught me that somehow, it arrives.
Sometimes at the last minute. Sometimes from places I couldn’t have predicted. Sometimes more than enough.
I’ve worried about money. I’ve made money. I’ve needed money.
But I refuse to postpone a vibrant life until a number in an account gives me permission to live it.
I believe in abundance.
But my vitality cannot depend on my bank balance.
9. Stop calling everything that hurt you a failure.
I can look backward now at moments I once labeled failure, rejection and even betrayal and see them differently.
They were preparing me.
That doesn’t mean they didn’t hurt.
They did.
But pain and purpose can exist in the same story.
Some of the moments I begged God to remove were cultivating something I would need later.
I just couldn’t see it yet.
10. Little Gi, don’t let the hurt define you.
If I could sit across from eight-year-old me today, I would take her little hands in mine and tell her:
You’re going to get hurt.
Don’t be afraid of that.
When life creates friction, lean in and love yourself harder.
All of you.
When something hurts, feel it. Don’t bury it. Don’t turn it into shame. Don’t spend the next forty years building walls so you’ll never have to feel it again.
Feel the pain.
Surrender it to God.
And then say thank you.
Because another layer of your superpower is being built.
You are going to discover that the things you once thought were weights can become your wings.
So don’t spend your life afraid that someone might hurt you again.
Say:
BRING IT ON! I’m building my superpower!
Because little Gi, here’s what I know about you now that you don’t know yet:
You are kind.
You are honest.
You care deeply.
You are going to love people with your whole heart.
And one day, God is going to use your life, including the messy parts, to help other people feel alive and whole.
So keep dreaming.
Take the scenic route.
Hold hands and mean it.
Love all of yourself.
And when you don’t know what happens next, surrender it all to God.
He will provide. He will protect. And He will show you what is yours.
Blurb
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.
About the Author
Giselle Mascarenhas-Villarreal is a transformational curator, author, and empowerment architect passionate about helping women reconnect with their authentic selves. Born and raised on the South Texas border, she has spent more than two decades empowering individuals to break through limiting beliefs, discover their purpose, and create lives of greater meaning and impact.
As the author of She Forgot She Was Free, Giselle guides women through a journey of self-discovery, healing, and personal transformation. Her work encourages women to release expectations, embrace their worth, and step boldly into the freedom and purpose they were created for.
Through coaching, speaking, retreats, and leadership in global women’s development communities, Giselle continues to inspire women to live with courage, clarity, and intention. Her mission is to help women remember who they are, reclaim their voice, and become the fullest expression of themselves.
Website | X/Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | Goodreads | Amazon | Purchase Signed Copy
