Let's Talk About Gatekeeping
You are allowed to have things that are yours. You are allowed to keep some of what you learned because you earned it and it matters to you and giving it away would cost you something real.
This word gets thrown around a lot on social media, and it carries a lot of heat with it.
Gatekeeping. The idea that a creator or artist who does not freely share every technique, every resource, every product they use, every method they have developed is somehow withholding something that belongs to other people. That they are being selfish or secretive or ungenerous. That they owe the internet full transparency into everything they have built and learned.
I have thoughts about this. And they may not be a popular one with some folks.
Let’s go back to the Middle Ages a minute. Way before social media. Before the internet. Before YouTube tutorials and online courses and creative communities where someone will answer almost any question if you ask it the right way.
What did people do when they wanted to learn a skilled craft? They became apprentices.
They left their families. They left their communities. They gave years of their lives to learning from a master craftsperson, and that apprenticeship came at an enormous personal cost. You did not get to choose your own hours or set your own terms. You worked in service of someone else's knowledge, earned the privilege of learning it slowly, over years, through repetition and failure and the kind of hard-won understanding that only comes from doing something badly for a very long time before you do it well.
The master chose what to share and when and with whom. That was not cruelty. That was the culture of craft. Knowledge had weight. Skills had value. The learning of them required something real from the person who wanted them.
Obviously that is not the world we live in today.
I am not suggesting it should be. But when I see a complete stranger get genuinely angry because a creator did not hand over their complete process and proprietary knowledge for free, I question their intentions.
Don’t get me wrong, I get questions regularly about the products I use, my techniques, how I achieve certain effects. And I share, up to a point. I am open about what I am willing to share and I try to be honest about where I stop. When I reach that point, I usually end the conversation the same way:
This is a great opportunity for you to learn and grow in this craft for yourself. Give yourself time. Really seek it out. That is what I did, and I am so glad I did it.
I learned my skills by failing. By trying things that did not work. By figuring out through experimentation and frustration and patience what actually produced the result I was after. Nobody handed it to me. And the learning that happened in that process, the deep, embodied, hard-won kind, is something I genuinely value. Not just the outcome, but the getting there.
If we just give all of that away for free, what does that say about the confidence we have in our own skill?
We worked for this. We earned it through real effort and real time. To hand it over wholesale to someone who simply asked for it feels cheap, not because knowledge should never be shared, but because some knowledge was paid for in a currency that deserves to be respected.
Here is the harder question I think every person asking for those resources should sit with: how dedicated are you actually?
If you are genuinely committed to a craft, the learning is part of it. The research, the experimentation, the failures that teach you things no tutorial ever could. That process is not an obstacle between you and the skill. It is the skill. The version of you who figured it out the hard way is a more capable maker than the version who was handed the answer.
That is not gatekeeping. That is just how craftsmanship works.
I want to be generous with my knowledge.
I believe in sharing, in community, in the idea that we are all better when we help each other grow. But there is a difference between generosity and the expectation that everything you have built should be freely available to anyone who wants it. You are allowed to have things that are yours. You are allowed to keep some of what you learned because you earned it and it matters to you and giving it away would cost you something real.
And the person who wants all of it should take a long hard look at what they actually want and whether they are willing to do the work to get there themselves.
That is my two cents. For what they are worth.