Expertise is a Hungry Beast and You’re Just Its Handler - Blaugust the Tenth
This is adapted from a presentation I gave today at work.
Picture it: patient, provider, ambient AI, screen reader — all in the same room — each one screaming for attention like some unholy choir. It broke my brain in ways that can’t be fully mended without rituals we dare not name.
Expertise is Not a Tombstone
We like to pretend there’s a final form of the self called Expert. That you graduate, shake some spectral hand, get your little paper, and ascend to the mountaintop.
But here’s the truth — expertise is not a tombstone you plant in the soil of your mind. It is motion. It is hunger. It is an action verb.
Even in accessibility — a niche so specific it feels like you could hold it in your palm — there are caverns under the surface, twisting passageways in which your knowledge will collapse, sink, and vanish if you linger too long.
We spend most of our time clinging to some jagged outcrop of understanding, staring into the darkness, trying to find the next handhold before we slip.
The Abyss is Big, and You Are Small
There is far, far more that we don’t know. And then there’s the even more unnerving category: the things we don’t even know we don’t know. Those are the creatures swimming deep below, unseen, but whose shadows ripple the surface when you least expect it. The work of the expert is to drag those unknown unknowns into the torchlight, knowing that we will never illuminate the whole cave.
This is the fun part. And the horrifying part. And the part that keeps you coming back.
The Most Rebellious Spell in the Modern World
So here’s something truly radical in an age obsessed with the Now: Say it with me — I don’t know.
Go ahead. Let it out. Whisper it like a confession.
** I. Don’t. Know.**
This isn’t surrender — it’s reconnaissance. The key is not wallowing in ignorance, but reckoning with it, stalking it, cornering it, and ripping it open to see what it hides.
Our role — as the accessibility heretics in the temple of technology — is to be the people best equipped to turn “I don’t know” into “I do now.” Not because we are omniscient, but because we have the tools to figure it out faster, sharper, and often with more creativity than the rest of the team.
The Long Game
Every day you will find new gaps in your knowledge. Every day you will fill some of them, only to find more waiting.
If you’re lucky — and relentless — you might someday add one tiny, barnacle-sized contribution to the great rusting hulk of human knowledge. It will take your whole career, and it will be worth it.
Expertise is not a state of being — it is the act of chasing what you don’t know. It is the madness of saying, “I don’t know… but I will.”
So, once more, together: I don’t know. But I’ll figure it out.
And that, my friends, is how you survive the abyss without getting swallowed whole.