Award-winning author Michele Roys is writing her story one small step at a time to help others

Award-winning author Michele Roys is writing her story one small step at a time

Author Michele Roys is sharing the story of her pain to help others through a journey which is about survival, meaning, and transformation

By Cian Reinhardt

Recently announced as a 2026 International Impact Book Award winner, Michele Roys says the recognition is about so much more than the award itself, but is a milestone on her journey living with trigeminal neuralgia.

Michele‘s journey begins with a childhood in Brazil, where she grew up surrounded by music and dance. At the age of 17, she decided to leave her homeland for India, where she travelled to volunteer for two years. She told I Love Limerick, “I’ve always been a very strong-willed child, very independent, very self-sufficient. If I put something in my head, I do it. I’ve always been very forward in that way; I’ve always felt that I had to make a difference in the world and people.”

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For her, leaving Brazil was a life-changing experience, she says, working with underprivileged children, promoting health and hygiene “really opened my eyes as well to the world”. The journey set her up for a career in leadership roles, and by the time she arrived in Ireland, her work began to take off, having worked in 10 countries across four continents, she became career-driven.

“I had already worked in 10 countries on four continents. Wow. I had been leading teams and been very, very career-driven,” she said, adding, “So from that person, to be sitting in an office having the first episode of trigeminal neuralgia, which I didn’t know at the time, but just feeling this pain coming out of nowhere, feeling like somebody is literally cutting my face open with a knife is the best way I can describe it. I felt like half of my face had fallen. I was getting electric shocks all at the same time, this is just an overwhelming feeling.”

She was taken to hospital with a suspected stroke in November 2018, but would eventually receive a trigeminal neuralgia diagnosis, and said to herself, “What’s happening? This can’t be happening. Not, not with me.”

She says, “I’m not somebody to stop in any way. So it was a very long road to even get the proper diagnosis. It took countless appointments and different neurologists and different types of doctors and specialists because the pain moved from one side of the face to the other side, then to the rest of my body.”

Michele thought this was something she could work through, believing her body should “just work with me”, and it didn’t. It would take four and a half years for an MRI to pick up that her superior cerebellar artery was looped around her trigeminal nerve, causing the trigeminal neuralgia, and would later be diagnosed with Lyme disease and fibromyalgia.

“Everybody kept looking and saying, ‘But you look just fine,’ So you’ll have some doctors that will look at you and say, ‘Well, everything seems to be normal, you know. We can’t explain the pain,’ or, ‘Maybe you’re too stressed,’ all of these different things,” Michele explains, leading to the title of her memoir; But You Look Just Fine: My Journey to Rediscover Joy Amidst Chronic Pain and Invisible Illness.

“You’re unfit for work,” another doctor said. The invisible weight of not being believed, the emotional toll, she says, was as heavy as the physical pain. “I felt, who am I? I’m just an invalid in bed that is no good.” What followed was not just illness, but a period of grieving for her old life, her identity, and her sense of control.

“This is the part of acceptance; understanding that what we face when we’re going through chronic illness or a change or a loss is literally grief,” Michele explains, saying there were moments of anger, denial, and despair.

At her lowest point, the pain became unbearable: “I was literally crying in bed and I was asking God to either take the pain away or take me.”

But something changed when she thought of her children, saying, “I had all these images of my kids in my head and how they needed me, you know?” From that point on, coping with the diagnosis became less about finding a cure and more about survival, taking one small, deliberate step each day.

She explains, “Making my bed in the morning… was the hardest thing.” Saying if you start with one small movement, those small actions helped rebuild something she lost: agency.

“I can’t control the pain, but what are the things that I could do,” she asked herself. Over time, Michele began to find moments of relief not in the absence of pain, but in the presence of something else, whether it was looking at the birds from her window, or remembering the healing power of music as she experienced in her childhood in Brazil.

When her mother visited, Michele explained she did not allow sounds in her house because it could be triggering, and her mother said one day, “You need to have music in the house, Michele. You know, music is healing. That’s what our ancestors always did. They danced in the rain.”

Dancing, nature, gratitude, and routine became part of what she calls her survival toolkit. During moments of movement, she says something changes, “It’s not like the pain will go away, but during the time I’m dancing, it disappears.”

That philosophy now sits at the heart of her book, which she says was shaped directly from journaling through the hardest years. Through this hardship she has created a memoir which is now helping others. She said, “I didn’t plan this to be my life at all. I don’t think anybody does. But how can you move with grace through the storm, and how can you find another purpose through it?

“So for me now, connecting with people who have chronic illness and invisible illness and finding their stories and appreciating the fact that I’m being bold and brave and sharing my story so openly, so vulnerably that they can see themselves in it, saying, ‘You’re speaking what I wanted to say, and I had no way to say it.'”  

Winning international recognition through the  2026 International Impact Book Award has not changed the mission; it has reinforced it. The mission has now grown to a weekly podcast and she has also announced the upcoming release of her audiobook and revealed her work with ongoing awareness campaigns, highlighting the Lighting Up Teal campaign set for October 7.

“If we’re able to bring awareness to it, like this year for me, I really want us to bring awareness to trigeminal neuralgia. On October 7th, there is a global Lighting Up Teal campaign, I’m now the Ireland awareness ambassador for the Facial Pain Association. So they’re in the States, but they are doing this whole thing, and Ireland is not part of it yet. But I said, ‘Oh no, we’re gonna be there!’

“Lighting Up Teal, people need to see this. People need to understand it and have more compassion, especially because it’s such a difficult disease.”

The goal is simple for Michele: making the invisible illness feel visible, and for people to be seen, heard, and understood, above all, making people feel they are not alone. Her award win has helped in this regard, with Michele telling I Love Limerick, “The impact of being open and honest about our personal lives and allowing others to see a glimpse of that, even though they’re facing those struggles, they just know that they’re not alone.

“ So I think that one of the biggest impacts is that knowing that they’re not alone in this journey.”