Kyler Wakefield

I work weekdays on my family’s ranch, and the night shift on weekends at a hotel in Santa Rosa, New Mexico. I’ve been sober since May 8, 2024.

The years leading up to this book were the roughest of my life — and almost ended it a few times. Starting around 2020 I began struggling with addiction. Cocaine. Fentanyl. Heroin. Meth. What started as experimentation did what addiction always does — it escalated into something I couldn’t control and didn’t recognize as myself anymore. My morals went out the window. My self-esteem followed. I had owned a house at twenty-two and was running my own construction company. Within a year and a half I was homeless and broke. The person I had been went somewhere I couldn’t find for a long time.

Between January and May of 2024 I overdosed three times. The last time I woke up in a hospital. That was the moment. What followed was a year moving between rehab facilities — fighting for the version of myself that was still in there somewhere. On May 8, 2024, I got sober. I have stayed sober since.

When I came out the other side the world looked different. Not just spiritually — though I did get closer to my God. Everything looked different. Truths I couldn’t see before became visible. Patterns emerged that I couldn’t unsee once I saw them. The years on the street had given me something no classroom teaches — an understanding of how systems work on people. How they capture and hold and exhaust the most vulnerable. How the gap between what we are told and what is real shows up first in the lives of the people who have nothing left to protect them from it.

In January of 2025 I went back to school. I earned my Associate of Science in Business Administration in eleven months, graduating with honors and an invitation to the National Society of Leadership and Success.

This book started the same year. Not because I had credentials. Because I couldn’t stop asking questions. Because once you see the pattern you can’t unsee it. Because I always wanted to write something — and somewhere between the hospital bed and the hotel front desk I realized that finding the truth was never going to be enough. The mission had to be sharing it.

I am not a professor. I am not a journalist or a politician or a Washington insider. I am a person who almost didn’t make it — and decided that making it wasn’t enough if it didn’t mean something.