You have been swept up in the world. You see the world as your meat and potatoes. It is your soap opera. You are watching it, and yet you are invested in all the parts. What would a soap opera be without a villain? You relate with the hero who may often be a victim, for a time anyway, and then later rise in shining colors only to become a victim later on once again. How you relate.
 
Soap operas are real life on Earth when you get caught up in them. Everyone on the screen except the villains may suffer, yet, sooner or later, often later, villains also get their comeuppance. The villains are even dear to you in their villainy. They have a certain daring and courage of their convictions that you wish you had.
 
When you are not caught up in the soap opera, the villain is as ridiculous as anyone else up there on the screen.
 
Even when you turn off the soap-opera, you still think about what went on and the absurdity of it. In that sense, soap operas are just as good or as bad as the life you seem to live in and out of your house.
 
Involvement is your middle name. It has been your middle name. Now you are leaning more toward equanimity. Maybe you just don’t need all the drama in your life any longer, for, even while you have it, it serves a purpose of some kind. Perhaps it gets your mind off yourself and the displacement you feel. The aggravation keeps your mind off what is deeply more discouraging than the difficulties you attribute your emotions to. Someone said something that riled you, yet there is more that riles you than you care to look at.
 
Your place in the Universe is dependent upon how you see it. You do not always feel honored. It is your feeling. I am sorry you are not given the recognition you deserve. There is a deeper recognition you do not have, and it is your own. It is your own, and it is your past. It is you who puts yourself down when your life revolves around what others think of you or may think of you.
 
What you pick up may be correct or it may not be, yet what others think, say, and do affect you very much. Too much. Mistaken or correct, you are affected, and you don’t know what to do with the hopelessness you feel. You try not to have ego, yet something hurts you deeply, and you may come up against it often. It certainly is not a little thing to you. How do you get out of that arena of he loves you or he loves you not, or out of the arena of she respects you or she respects you not, or the arena of the world is fair to you, or the world is not.
 
You would love to stay out of the arena of hurt feelings and thin skin, and, certainly, you would if only you could know how to. You want peaceful days and peaceful life. Instead your days and life are filled with an anxiety that leaves you weak. Maybe you already stay out of the fray, yet the battles go on within you, and you seem unable to curb your participation.  
 
You tell yourself you won’t spin around so many things any more, and yet you can’t seem to get off the wheel.
 
No matter how close you come to Me, it seems that that wheel keeps spinning. It doesn’t matter any more whose victim you are. You are your own victim. Try as you may, you seem to wreak revenge upon yourself. You are someone’s prey. When no one is around except in your thoughts, after all, it seems to be you after all who preys on yourself.
 
Beloveds, it is not that you have to develop a thick skin. No armor is great enough to defend you against your own thoughts. Indeed, you think too much.
 
Take a good walk. Help a friend. Get your mind on what you can do to make the world kinder. There is no need for you to carry the thoughts of others in so many waking moments. It does not have to matter so much to you what others think of you.
 
Think of how well I think of you. I see you. I see your light. I wipe your tears. Come, see as I do, and others will be coming as well to see as I do. Your heart will be assuaged, and others will step over a threshold as well. You will be light of foot again, and you will be blessed by new thoughts. Let Me clasp you now. Think of Me, and lesser thinking will drop off. You are with Me right now.