Wonderland 2024

I2- "UNimportant things"

I used to believe that what people thought of me was extremely important. Growing up in an environment where you're both removed from your main culture, yet surrounded by reminders of it at all times is weird. If a temple is where you worship, and you worship at home, home becomes your temple, yeah? So the duality of having a temple-home gave way for weird dynamics growing up. There were the traditional ways a house was a home, but then there were also these expectations on top of it, like not having people over. We also weren’t allowed to go to other people’s places. At a time when playdates and sleepovers are the social norm and social currency, that left me somewhat poor in the social department.
Toss in the fact that I started school late in the US, I was Asian, and still had baby fat on me, it was the perfect combination for exclusion. In hindsight, it followed me through K-12 and a little into college and post college. The community at the time was predominantly white so I definitely stuck out and not completely in a positive way.
Going back to my point, I craved external validation- my mom was strict, so the ways that she validated us (grades, behavior) were more "given" validations than actual accomplishment validations- not that I had very many. So in 2024 I'm vowing to stop caring so much what people think of me. I've been sharing my Wonderland entries around with some friends and I no longer get the heart-thumping, crippling anxiety of "What will they think of it?" It's more of a "here's something fun I wrote and I'd like to share with you" type of feeling and it's quite relieving, I will say.
I'm glad to be rid of one type of anxiety, where I don't care what people think anymore. I believe it's not so important to me anymore because I've seen how much it affects others- namely my mom and Hollywood friend- and I really don't want that to be me. I also don't want others to think of me the way I think of them when they start saying things like "I'm not that (insert something they never were)," or on the opposite end of the spectrum, "I think I'm better at XYZ because of (some unrelated reason)". So I suppose, at the end of it, I'm still caring, just not as much.

WC: 407
Prompt: As the new year begins, consider at least one thing you considered too ‘important’ in the past. What makes it so ‘unimportant’ now?