The Hidden Voice is the pen name of the author of Love Isn’t Born. It’s Built. – Children Beyond Blood, an English-language lived-experience book exploring adoption, identity, origins, family separation, grief and belonging.
I did not write this book because I wanted to become famous. I wrote it because it was the book I had spent years searching for.
For a long time, I did not really call myself a writer. I did not come to writing through certainty. I came to it through questions about adoption, identity, belonging, love, origins, and the silent places inside a person that are not always easy to explain.
Love Isn’t Born. It’s Built. – Children Beyond Blood
When I began writing Love Isn’t Born. It’s Built. – Children Beyond Blood, I was not trying to write another familiar adoption story. There are already many stories that make adoption sound like a fairy tale, as if love, identity and belonging are simple things once a child is given a family. But life is rarely that simple. I wanted to write something I would have needed when my own questions had no answers, when I did not know whether what I felt was allowed or wrong.
My story begins in England. I was born in Epping, Essex, and spent my first nine years in Watford before later growing up and living in Sicily. The first version was written in Italian, but writing it in English carried a different meaning. It felt like allowing the book to return to the first landscape of my life.
Writing this book did not begin as a neat narrative. I wrote what I had lived as points, fragments and questions that needed answers. For years, many of those questions had nowhere to go. Writing gave them a place to stand still long enough for me to look at them.
Sometimes a book does not begin with a plot. Sometimes it begins with a question that will not leave you.
What Adoption Does
One of the questions I carried was about what adoption does, and what it does not do. Adopted people are not born different. Often, it is society that places a label on us. A label cannot truly change who we are, but it can wound us. I wanted to write towards the person underneath the label.
Adoption can change a name, a legal family, a place of belonging, and even the story that others tell about you. But it cannot erase the body you were born in, or replace the first part of your existence because society finds it easier to simplify your story. Writing helped me understand that I did not have to choose between the different parts of myself. I could place them on the same page and allow them to exist together.
I also wanted to write honestly about love. There is often a fairy-tale version of reunion, as if meeting the person who gave birth to you should automatically return the missing pieces of yourself. I wanted to make room for a quieter truth. Sometimes it is not like that. Sometimes it cannot be like that. One meeting, one embrace, one resemblance cannot become love simply because people expect it to. And if it does not, that does not make us ungrateful, cold, or wrong. It makes us human.
Love does not begin in one encounter after many years. Love is built through presence, care and time.
That is also why I wanted to honour adoptive parents. They too are often labelled, as if they were somehow half parents. But they are not half parents. They did not conceive us biologically, but they conceived their love for us. Love that grows through care, presence and daily choice is not a lesser kind of love.
The Hidden Voice
The name The Hidden Voice was born when I wrote my first book, as a way to protect my family and myself. At first, it felt like a shield, a way to speak without standing completely exposed. But without realising it, that hidden voice became my voice: the place from which I could say the things I had carried for years, and through which I now hope to give voice to other adopted people too.
When I finished writing, I felt fear. I was afraid that I had written it badly, because I had never truly seen myself as a writer. I was afraid of being misunderstood, or that the book might not be understood in the way I had intended.
But writing taught me something important: you do not have to feel like a writer before you write something true. Sometimes you become a writer by moving through the fear that you are not one.
That is what I would say to anyone carrying a true story but feeling afraid to write it. Do not wait until the story is perfect. Do not wait until you feel brave every day. Begin with the question that keeps returning. Begin with the sentence that hurts. You do not have to understand everything before you write. Sometimes writing is the way you begin to understand.
The Truth in Writing
For me, writing did not keep me inside the pain. It helped me put a full stop where, for years, there had only been questions. After reunion, I understood that I could not continue searching for a love that had never been built. That realisation was not coldness, and it was not ingratitude. It was truth.
Today, that part of my story no longer hurts me in the same way. I can look at it with clarity, because I know now that love cannot be forced into existence by blood, by expectation, or by one long-awaited meeting. Perhaps this is one of the deepest reasons I wrote the book: to say to someone else, stop feeling guilty for not finding love where you were told it should automatically be. You are not wrong. You are human.
You can write the book you spent years searching for. When you finally allow your hidden voice to speak, it does not only help you. It may help someone else pause, reflect, and feel less alone with the questions they have carried in silence.
(c) The Hidden Voice
About Love Isn’t Born. It’s Built. – Children Beyond Blood by The Hidden Voice:
What remains when the love that raised you does not coincide with blood?
Love Isn’t Born. It’s Built. is not a book about adoption. It is a book about everything that word fails to contain. It speaks of the way others look at you, the questions left unspoken, the feeling of being different even when you have been deeply loved.
Through a clear and uncompromising voice, the author walks in first person through the experience of being an adopted child: growing up without a narrated origin, carrying guilt that belongs to no one, searching — and sometimes choosing to stop searching — without shame.
The book also makes space for what is rarely said: the silent pain of adoptive parents, the fear of not having been enough, the complexity of chosen bonds.
Love Isn’t Born. It’s Built. is not against adoption. It is against silence and oversimplified narratives.
For those who have had two origins and only one home. For those who have learned that love does not come from blood.
Because love isn’t born. It’s Built.
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