Back when I grew up online, there was a word that I worried would be used against me. It was ‘source?’ Source? meant “back up your claims with the source of knowledge you are using”. Sometimes this was easy, you just needed to link to the article you had gotten your information from. But other times you had been running your mouth a bit and source? was problematic because, well, there was no source. It was like the ultimate online “getting owned”: you didn’t know what you were talking about because you couldn’t even back it up with the source of knowledge you are using to make your argument.

Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately depending on how you look at it, I still carry my fear of source? today. As I’m writing blog posts I can feel the pressure to add hyperlinks or book titles to back up my claims. A lot of the time this can feel tiresome and makes me miss the freedom I seemed to have when I blogged in my teens & 20s. The pressure to supply sources still stops many of my nascent blog posts in their tracks as I realise “ah shit, to say what I’m saying I should really have actually read that book and I haven’t and I don’t want to claim that I have when I haven’t so…”

Maybe this is a good thing. It makes me slower to post and requires me to know my subject reasonably well when posting about it. But I don’t know if it’s something to do with being Older but everything seems more interconnected these days and “knowing my subject” can seem daunting, even exhausting. Consider my post The sea of spirituality for example: how do you write about spirituality with confidence, ready to parry any question of source? with knowledgeable answers? That’s one of the main reasons why ultimately I ended up just talking about the definition of the word spirituality in that post.

A relevant question is, who exactly is going around saying source? on small niche blogs like mine? Does that even happen anymore? Or are we so post-truth that no one cares anymore. I don’t know. I know that personally my inner critic is reluctant to let me post anything without providing sources and knowing I have at least read one or two books on the topic. Maybe it’s an OCD thing, I’m really not sure. Even when I’m just writing opinion or reflections, I still feel wary of saying anything that could generate a source? comment. I would like to be free of the fear of it but I don’t know how.

Another source of friction to posting is a sense that it’s weird or something I should have aged out of by now. Whenever I go to post there is a voice in the back of my head questioning whether it is absolutely necessary for me to post this, and if I am going to post it I need to make sure it won’t embarrass my children one day. How does anyone post anything online anymore? When I look around at people that are still blogging it tends to be on areas they have expertise – normally relating to their job. It feels like otherwise you either make TikToks, or write a book, and there is no middle ground.

I hope that writing this post helps to expose source? to the “disinfectant of sunlight” and maybe diminish some of its power over me. At the very least, writing helps me to know myself and grow as a person and that isn’t something that happens if I get AI to do it for me. But for some reason I also like pressing publish and making my writing available online for everyone. So here I am.