What if No One Believed You?

Before Ryan Prior learned how to give other people language for their experiences, he lost most of the words he used to describe himself.

At 17, Ryan was a soccer player, cross-country runner, strong student, and aspiring college applicant. Then he developed myalgic encephalomyelitis, commonly known as chronic fatigue syndrome.

The illness consumed most of his junior year. He entered a hospital-homebound program, with teachers coming to his house because he could no longer attend school consistently.

His world became very small.

The little energy he had went toward managing his body and trying to recover. But Ryan could still read, so he spent much of that year in bed with books. His physical life had narrowed, while his historical, philosophical, and literary interests continued to expand.

For years afterward, Ryan believed recovering from the illness might remain the greatest accomplishment of his life.

But the experience did something else. It forced him to confront a question most people do not encounter until much later:

Who are you when the things you do are taken away?

During his senior year, Ryan wrote an essay about belonging. He described identities like cross-country captain and student council president as “superficial definitions of selfhood.”

They were the kinds of accomplishments that could help him get into a good college. They were not sufficient answers to who he was.

Ryan compared his illness to placing the Hubble Space Telescope above the Earth’s atmosphere, where its view would no longer be clouded. The experience had removed him from normal life and given him a clearer view of certain truths.

“I think true things felt much more true when my body was in an incredibly weak state,” he told me.

That sentence explains a lot about the person Ryan became.

His illness taught him to look beneath the identities people present to the world. It also gave him an instinct for recognizing realities that are deeply felt but difficult to explain.

Ryan and I attended the University of Georgia together. I first came to understand more of his story when he shared it through Wish Dish, which was my own first plunge into online content and community.

Our relationship continued through very different chapters of our lives.

Ryan supported a global summit we organized through Kairos, bringing together young founders and leaders from around the world. Years later, he came to an event I held in San Francisco around my 30th birthday.

Those moments happened on opposite sides of the country, in very different environments. Ryan showed up for both.

People reveal something about themselves through the rooms they repeatedly choose to enter.

Ryan gravitates toward people who think beyond the surface of a problem. People who connect disciplines, cultures, institutions, and lived experience instead of staying inside one category.

That global orientation began early.

Ryan was born in Omaha and moved to Okinawa as a baby while his father served in the Air Force. His mother was a nurse, and his parents had originally met while working in Japan.

During elementary school, his family lived outside Washington, D.C. His neighbors came from Iran and Punjab. His classmates had roots in Guatemala, Iraq, Sierra Leone, Singapore, and other parts of the world. School trips took him to the National Archives, the Air and Space Museum, and the FBI headquarters.

A level of internationalism that many people travel to find later in life simply felt normal to him.

It shaped more than his interest in the world. It shaped how he thinks.

Ryan naturally looks for the connection between the personal and the political, the scientific and the human, the individual story and the institution surrounding it. He wants to understand what sits beneath the obvious explanation and what becomes visible when different perspectives are placed in the same room.

His illness gave that curiosity a purpose.

As a collegiate correspondent for USA Today, Ryan wrote about his experience with chronic fatigue syndrome. The article received an enormous response because he articulated something many people were living through but rarely saw represented in the media.

Ryan took a lasting lesson from that response: If you want to write something that resonates, sometimes you have to say the thing that is not being said.

The article led Ryan and a small team of young filmmakers to create Forgotten Plague, a feature-length documentary about the illness.

They formed a nonprofit, raised money through crowdfunding, traveled to nine states, and interviewed somewhere between 60 and 70 patients, scientists, and family members.

Most of the story found them.

After Ryan published a follow-up article and linked to the crowdfunding campaign, people began writing to him. Patients introduced the team to researchers. Families offered their experiences. One person led them to another.

When people asked Ryan how he knew whom to interview, his answer was simple:

“Community told me. I read my email, and it tells me.”

The film eventually gave patients something many had never possessed: a way to make their experience understandable to the people around them.

They showed it to spouses who had doubted them, relatives who did not understand, and doctors who had dismissed their symptoms.

Ryan heard versions of the same response for years:

I watched your film. It told my story. I showed it to my family, and now they believe me.

One of the most painful parts of an invisible illness is that your reality can become debatable in the eyes of other people.

The film made that reality harder to dismiss.

That is where Ryan’s relationship with writing becomes much more than a relationship with words.

Writing gave him a way to turn an invisible experience into something other people could recognize. The documentary allowed an entire community to see itself and then explain itself to the world.

Ryan later spent more than six years at CNN, eventually becoming a science and health features writer during the pandemic.

By the spring of 2020, he understood something many people covering COVID had not yet considered. Viral infections could leave people chronically ill long after the initial infection passed.

His own illness, advocacy work, and reporting had prepared him to recognize what was coming.

Within the first few months of the pandemic, Ryan began interviewing people experiencing what would become known as Long COVID. He wrote as many stories on the subject as his editors would allow and became one of CNN’s internal experts on it.

That reporting eventually became The Long Haul: How Long Covid Survivors Are Revolutionizing Health Care, published by MIT Press.

Ryan sees the book as a sequel to Forgotten Plague.

The illness he experienced in high school became an article. The article helped create a community. The community helped produce a documentary. Years later, everything Ryan had learned allowed him to recognize the significance of Long COVID early and give another population of patients language for what was happening to them.

Each project prepared him to see the next one sooner.

More recently, Ryan completed a Master in Public Administration at the Harvard Kennedy School. He studied leadership, traveled to countries experiencing war and political conflict, and became part of what he calls a “multidisciplinary community of excellence.”

Those experiences expanded the global worldview I had seen in him through Kairos. Ryan comes alive around people who are intelligent without being narrow, ambitious without losing their idealism, and interested in questions larger than their immediate professional world.

“Everything good in life is downstream from community,” he told me.

Ryan’s life is evidence of that belief. His writing created community, and those communities repeatedly showed him where his work needed to go next.

Now our paths are converging again.

We recently welcomed Ryan to Arcbound as a Senior Staff Writer.

His résumé makes the quality of the hire fairly obvious. He has been a journalist, documentary filmmaker, author, patient advocate, policy thinker, teacher, and student of leadership.

The deeper reason he belongs here is harder to capture on a résumé.

Ryan knows how to listen beneath the surface. He can find the structure connecting decades of someone’s experience, identify the idea that has not yet been fully expressed, and challenge a leader when the thinking is not clear enough.

A few days into his work with us, Ryan described the role this way:

“I talk to leaders about how to lead better. And sometimes my job is to lead.”

That is the standard we aim to set inside Arcbound.

Our clients entrust us with stories, ideas, and experiences they may have spent decades developing. They need more than clean writing. They need someone capable of recognizing what is true, asking the question that takes the conversation deeper, and giving their judgment a structure strong enough to travel.

Near the end of our conversation, Ryan shared an observation from his leadership studies: author and authority share much of the same linguistic history.

An author was historically understood as more than someone who put words on a page. The word also carried the meaning of a generator, producer, and source. To author something was, in a sense, to authorize it.

Ryan’s career has been an exploration of that relationship.

The first authority he had to claim was over his own story. He then used writing to help other people reclaim theirs.

Some authority comes from a title. The kind Ryan carries was earned through lived experience and the trust of communities that allowed him to represent them.

More than a decade after we attended the University of Georgia together, there is something meaningful about seeing the relationship come full circle.

Ryan showed up for the communities and experiences I was building. Now we have the opportunity to build alongside one another.

His arrival is a major step forward for our writing department. It also reflects the depth, care, and intellectual standard we want surrounding every person who trusts Arcbound with their story.

Ryan has spent his life finding words for realities other people could not yet see.

Now he will help our clients do the same.

Connect with Ryan

Ryan’s Website
Ryan’s Linkedin