What Is Hidden Is Not Gone: Writing Toward Belonging

The completed manuscript: Huldufólk: A Modern Icelandic Folktale

There is something enduring in the idea that what is hidden is not lost, only waiting. That belief runs through modern and ancient folklore, memory, and the stories we tell when the world feels uncertain or incomplete. It is also, I’ve come to believe, a way of describing something essential about ourselves.

We all carry hidden lives. Not secrets in the shallow sense, but deeper truths—parts of ourselves shaped by longing, by loss, by the persistent sense that we do not fully belong where we stand. Some people bury those parts. Others circle them, sensing their gravity without quite understanding it. And some, whether by choice or by circumstance, are eventually forced to confront them.

I have long been drawn to stories of hidden worlds, not because of their magic, but because of what they reveal about ours. A hidden people, living alongside us yet unseen, is less a fantasy than a mirror. It reflects the distance between who we are and who we allow ourselves to be. It raises questions about survival, not merely in the physical sense, but in the deeper sense of what must be preserved, what must change, and what must be surrendered in order to endure.

Tradition offers safety. It gives structure, continuity, and a sense of identity. But tradition can also become a boundary, a way of holding the world at arm’s length long after the cost of that distance has become too great. At some point, survival demands something else. It demands adaptation, risk, and the willingness to reach beyond what has always been known.

That movement, away from isolation and toward connection, is rarely clean. It carries the possibility of loss, rejection, and transformation that cannot be undone. Yet it is also the only path toward renewal. Love, in this sense, is not merely an emotion but a force that disrupts and reorders. It challenges inherited boundaries. It asks whether belonging is something we inherit or something we choose.

What interests me most, as a writer, is the moment when a character can no longer remain divided, when the hidden self and the visible self must come into alignment. That moment is often born of grief, or of love, or of some irreversible event that strips away the possibility of retreat. It is not a moment of triumph, at least not immediately. It is a moment of recognition. And from that recognition, everything else follows.

There is a particular stillness that comes at the end of a long work. The story is no longer becoming. It is there, complete, separate, no longer entirely yours. What remains is a quiet mixture of satisfaction and something harder to name. Perhaps it is the recognition that the work must now find its own path, independent of the one who carried it this far.

This is where I am today. Grateful for the story, for the characters, for what they revealed along the way, and aware that whatever comes next, the work itself is finished. It will either find its place in the world through others, or it will find it another way. In either case, it will endure.

In the end, stories about hidden worlds are not really about what lies beyond our sight. They are about what lies within it—what we have refused to see, or have not yet had the courage to accept. They ask whether survival is possible without connection, whether identity can endure without change, and whether love can bridge the distance between what is and what might be.

I suspect the answer, as it often is, lies somewhere in the act of crossing that distance.

—R. L. Niblock

R. L. Niblock is the author of Huldufólk: A Modern Icelandic Folktale.