Choosing the career nobody around you understands means explaining yourself a lot. Explain it and keep going.

An unfamiliar path costs you the shorthand. People cannot picture what you do, so every conversation requires translation, and the repeated explaining can start to feel like repeated justification. It is not. Their confusion is about their reference points rather than about the merit of the work.

Build one plain sentence that describes what you do and use it without embarrassment. Save the detail for the people who ask a second question. Find at least one person who does understand, because a single informed conversation offsets a great many baffled ones.