Mentorship

What’s my problem?

I have many, actually, but I figured out a major one: as an adolescent and young adult I never established a mentor/mentee relationship with an adult.

There were plenty of teachers, professors and professionals I looked up to but I was just too distant or uninvolved with them, even when one or two of them deliberately reached out to me.

I used a "flaw-O-matic" as if they were used cars, where a single perceived flaw made ignoring them seem justified. "He’s too religious," "Her research is murky and inconsequential," "He doesn’t like me anyway."

Perhaps contributing to this tendency of mine is the fact that someone I love a great deal, a very important and influential person in my life, has a severe flaw (in my eyes) that adds a harmful element of contradiction to my admiration for him. Looking up to a person who nonetheless has beliefs antithetical to my own may have confused me during my transition to adulthood, when beliefs and worldviews became ever more important to me.

I am unjustifiably suspicious sometimes, too, even while recognizing that there are so many great educators and professionals out there. Some of them I have simply admired from afar, not revealing in conversation that I had googled them, read their published papers, read news articles that quoted them, asked others what they thought of them, put in extra effort to impress them, etc.

Yet mentorship is so important. It is how you set your course, how you determine who you want to be.

Acknowledging all this, I resolve to be more deliberate about seeking guidance from an older adult or two whom I respect. I take my familiar yellow legal pad, which is the seeding-ground of my ideas and promises, before me. I write down my plan and date it in black ink.

Later I can look at it and say, undeniably, that I wrote that and made a promise to myself on that day, undeniably because I can read it there. I write it down, and I follow it.