They reply to emails.
They show up to meetings.
They never say no outright.
From the outside, everything looks functional.
That’s why it took me so long to admit something felt wrong.
The replies that arrive too late to matter
At first, I told myself to be patient.
My advisor would respond to emails — just not quickly.
A few days would pass. Sometimes a week.
When the reply finally came, it was polite. Brief. Reasonable.
“Looks fine.”
“Let’s discuss later.”
“Can you remind me next meeting?”
But research doesn’t pause while you wait.
Decisions pile up. Momentum slips.
By the time feedback arrived, the moment to act had already passed.
I stopped asking certain questions — not out of confidence, but out of timing.
Meetings without guidance still count as meetings
We met regularly. That part mattered.
What didn’t happen was direction.
I would bring drafts, outlines, half-formed ideas.
They would skim, nod, and say things like:
“Yeah, that could work.”
“Try it and see.”
“We’ll know once you run it.”
There was no pushback.
There was also no steering.
After each meeting, I walked away unsure what to do next — not because options were many, but because priorities were never named.
Being heard is not the same as being guided.
How “being busy” slowly becomes absence
I never doubted they were busy.
Grants. Committees. Travel.
Important work, all of it.
That made it harder to ask for more.
Every time I considered sending a follow-up, I hesitated:
Am I bothering them?
Is this something I should handle myself?
Eventually, I handled almost everything myself.
That’s when “availability” quietly turned into absence — not through neglect, but through accumulated deferral.
The cost of being effectively unsupervised
For a while, independence felt empowering.
I made decisions quickly.
I learned by trial and error.
But over time, the gaps showed.
Projects drifted without correction.
Skills developed unevenly.
Mistakes repeated longer than they needed to.
Years later, I realized how much time had been lost — not because I lacked ability, but because no one was watching closely enough to intervene early.
Why this is so hard to name
There was no incident.
No email I could point to.
No missed meeting.
No harsh words.
Try explaining it out loud:
“They were around, but not really involved.”
It sounds vague. Ungrateful, even.
So most students don’t say anything.
They assume this is what “independence” looks like.
They assume everyone else is navigating the same fog more gracefully.
What presence actually means
Presence isn’t constant availability.
It’s not answering every email within the hour.
It’s knowing when to step in.
It’s noticing when a student is circling the same problem too long.
It’s saying, “Pause. Let’s recalibrate.”
Without that, students don’t fail loudly.
They just wander.
What I wish I had recognized sooner
I wish I had paid attention to how I felt after meetings.
Not stressed — just directionless.
Not overwhelmed — just oddly alone.
Those feelings weren’t a personal weakness.
They were information.
Being polite, responsive, and busy doesn’t automatically add up to mentorship.
Sometimes the hardest thing to accept is that no one did anything wrong —
and yet something essential was missing.