Being the only person making your kind of thing is lonely at first and can be an advantage later.

Having no peers means no shortcuts, nobody to compare notes with, and nobody who immediately understands what you are attempting. That is a real cost, and it is why most people drift towards whatever their friends are doing. The same isolation is what produces work that does not look like anyone else’s. What makes you hard to place now is what makes you findable later.

Find your people sideways rather than locally: online, in older work, in a nearby field. Show the work to one or two who get it, not to a crowd. Write down what you are after, so you can tell loneliness from being wrong.