The Mentor Who Didn't Know They Were Mentoring You
She never called herself a mentor. She probably doesn't know she was one. But she changed the entire direction of how I work, and I think about something she said at least once a week, and I've never actually told her any of this.
Informal mentorship is weird like that. It doesn't announce itself. It doesn't come with a structure or a check-in schedule or a formal relationship. It just happens — someone says something, or does something, or exists in a way that shows you a possibility you didn't know was available to you.
What Informal Mentorship Actually Looks Like
It's usually not advice. The most impactful informal mentors I've had weren't people who told me what to do. They were people who showed me what was possible by doing it themselves. Watching someone navigate a situation you're about to face — watching how they handle the difficult client, the bad feedback, the moment when the project falls apart — that's more useful than any advice they could give you.
The girlnextup community has talked about this a lot — about the specific value of seeing someone who looks like you doing the thing you want to do. Not because representation is just symbolic, but because it's informational. It tells you the thing is possible. That information changes what you attempt.
The Specific Thing She Said
I'm not going to say who she is, because she doesn't know I'm writing this and it would be weird. But the thing she said was something like: "I stopped asking for permission to take up space and started just taking it. The permission never came anyway."
She said it offhandedly, in the middle of a conversation about something else. She wasn't trying to mentor me. She was just talking. But I've been thinking about it for two years.
The creative community conversations often circle around this — around the difference between waiting for validation and just doing the thing. The informal mentor is often the person who shows you, by example, that the waiting is optional.
Why You Never Tell Them
Part of it is that it would be awkward. "Hey, you changed my life with something you said offhandedly two years ago" is a lot to put on someone. Part of it is that the relationship doesn't have a container for that kind of disclosure — you're not in a formal mentorship, so there's no obvious moment to say it.
But I think part of it is also that naming it would change it. The informal mentorship works partly because it's not formal — because the person isn't performing mentorship, they're just being themselves, and you're learning from that. Making it explicit might make them self-conscious, might make them start performing the role instead of just living it.
The youth culture writing has a version of this — about the way that naming a subculture often kills it, because the naming makes it self-aware in a way that changes what it is. Informal mentorship might work the same way.
What You Can Do With This
Two things. First: think about who your informal mentors have been. The people who shaped how you work without ever calling it that. You probably owe them a thank-you, even if it's just a message that says "I've been thinking about something you said."
Second: think about who you might be informally mentoring right now without knowing it. Someone is watching how you handle things. Someone is learning from how you exist in your work. You don't have to do anything differently — just know that it's happening, and that it matters.
The personal essays keep coming back to this: the most important influences are often the ones that didn't announce themselves. Pay attention to what you're absorbing, and to what you're putting out there for others to absorb.