If You Build It: A Neurodivergent Field of Dreams

I used to think I was Ray.

You know—Kevin Costner’s character in Field of Dreams. The dreamer. The builder. The man who hears a whisper in the cornfield and dares to follow it.

“If you build it, he will come.”

Ray didn’t know what he was building. He just knew it mattered. That something—someone—was waiting on the other side of belief.

That was me, once.
I heard a whisper too.
Not from a cornfield, but from the quiet ache of questions that never got answered.
From the silence in classrooms.
From the labels that landed like verdicts.
From the children who didn’t fit, and the mothers who didn’t stop loving them anyway.

So I started building.
Not a baseball field.
A book.
A book of questions.

Not answers.
Not diagnoses.
Just questions—honest, open, aching questions.

Because sometimes, asking the right question is the most radical act of love.

And as I built, I thought I was Ray.
The one who carved something out of nothing.
The one who believed.

But the deeper I went, the more I realized—I wasn’t Ray anymore.

I was Terence Mann.

James Earl Jones.
The voice.
The witness.
The one who stood at the edge of the field and named the myth.

“They’ll come, Ray. They’ll come for reasons they can’t even fathom.”

That’s what this book is.
That’s what this movement is.
It’s not just a field.
It’s a place where people come—mothers, especially.
Women who’ve carried the weight of misunderstood children.
Who’ve fought for IEPs and sat through evaluations and cried in parking lots because no one saw the brilliance behind the behaviors.

They come because they know.
They come because they’ve lived it.
They come because they’re tired of being told their child is a problem when they know their child is a poem.

And when they read this book—this field of questions—they cry.
Not because it’s sad.
Because it’s true.
Because it speaks the language they’ve been waiting to hear.

“We are not a diagnosis. We are so much more.”

This story is for them.
For the mother who stayed up late googling symptoms and wondering if she missed something.
For the grandmother who sees herself in her grandchild’s quiet stimming.
For the teacher who knows that brilliance doesn’t always sit still.

It’s for every woman who’s ever loved a neurodivergent child and wondered if the world would ever catch up.

And it’s for the child too.
The one who didn’t fit.
The one who was labeled.
The one who is now grown, and writing this story.

I’m not Ray anymore.
I’m Terence.
And I’m telling you: they will come.

They’ll come for the questions.
They’ll come for the truth.
They’ll come for the chance to see their child—and themselves—clearly.

Because this isn’t just a book.
It’s a field.

And it’s ready—to speak in a language we finally understand.