I did not expect it to be this lonely.
I had expected the practical difficulties — the technical problems, the financial uncertainty, the sheer volume of work involved in building something from nothing. I had not fully anticipated the particular kind of isolation that comes from working on something that does not yet exist, in a field that is not entirely sure it needs it.
The Specific Loneliness of Building
When you are building something new, you spend a lot of time in a state that is hard to describe to people who are not in it. You can see, clearly, what you are trying to create. You can see why it matters. But you are surrounded by people who are, reasonably, responding to what exists rather than to what you are trying to bring into existence.
This creates a particular kind of conversational gap. You are talking about a future state. Most of the people around you are talking about the present one. The conversations do not quite connect.
And because what you are building does not yet exist, you cannot point to it. You cannot say: look, here is the thing I am making, here is why it matters. You can only describe it, and descriptions of things that do not exist are always a little unconvincing, even to people who want to believe in them.
The Doubt That Comes With It
There is also the doubt. Not the productive kind — the kind that makes you sharper, that makes you interrogate your assumptions, that keeps you honest. The other kind. The 3am kind, where you wonder whether the gap you identified is real, whether the thing you are building actually addresses it, whether you are the right person to be building it.
I do not think this doubt goes away. I think you learn to work alongside it. But I wish someone had told me earlier that its presence does not mean you are wrong. It means you are doing something that matters enough to be uncertain about.
What Sustains You
What has sustained me, more than anything, is specificity. Not the abstract belief that what I am building matters — though that matters too — but the specific, concrete moments when it connects with a specific person in a specific way.
An educator who says: I have been looking for exactly this. A learner who completes something and describes what shifted for them. A conversation that would not have happened without the thing I built.
These moments are not frequent enough to eliminate the loneliness. But they are frequent enough to make it bearable. And they are the clearest evidence I have that the gap I identified was real.
If you are building something — in education, in health, in any field — and you are finding it lonely: that is normal. It does not mean you are doing it wrong. It means you are doing something that has not been done before, and that is always, at least partly, a solitary act.
Find the specific moments. Hold onto them. They are what you are building toward.
