The Things I Hate About Myself

Forward

My name is Richard Eugene Bruce.
To you I am a nobody. Sometimes to me I am the same. I am a face in the crowd, the man stood next to you in the supermarket and maybe the one who walks past you in the street. To at least one person I am somebody of huge importance. I am the hand that comforts. I share words that ease and words that enrage. Within me I have unconditional love and conditional hate. I am full of passion and a certain emptiness.

During my life I have been homeless, I have performed on stages in front of thousands of people. I have been a criminal and a Master Freemason. I have been a business owner and slave.
I have signed autographs and loan applications. I have been an addict and a spiritual coach. Adored and abandoned.
I am sinner and Saint, I have stolen, and I have given, I am a lover and fighter and everything in-between. I have wanted to die, and I have wanted to live. I have saved at least one life and thought about taking one. I am son, father, brother, nephew, cousin, friend, and rival.

Now being an "Author" is another brush stroke in the painting of me.

A portrait of an artist as a man.

When I started writing this book it was not a book at all. It was a form of therapy. A way for me to take out the rubbish. However, it grew into this colossal obsession to push the boundaries of what I can expose about myself.
When I decided to write this, I gave myself one condition. To keep peeling back the layers of honesty until you could see my core and no more. Me laid bare for the world to see. To admire and to pity. I needed to see how honest I could be to you and myself.

However, the goal i have set myself will be difficult to accomplish, without rattling a few cages along the way. If this book affects or offends you then know this... You must be somebody I care about very much, or, somebody I love. You are somebody who has made up the very fabric of my being. On the other hand if you are not mentioned it does not mean you mean any less.

So, without further ado here it is. My endless suicide note.
This is what it is like to be me, to be you and above all to be human.

Here are the things I love, and the things I hate about myself.