on niche

A few weeks ago I went to a welcome party at the school I had just been admitted to, where alumni mingled with the new admits. An alumnus asked what I did, and I said I made small electronic instruments. He asked what kind, and I said modular synthesizers. The conversation paused. I added, it's a niche thing.

The word came out before I had decided to say it. It does that often. It surfaces when I am with people outside this corner. It surfaces again when someone asks why my sales are so low, or whether I can break even when I keep buying more equipment than I sell. I reach for it like a small shield and let it do the explaining.

I am not lying when I say it. The instruments are made for a few hundred people who care about that corner of sound, and the word, accurate as it is, has also become something else. A reasonable description, or a block I place between myself and a larger world I am quietly avoiding.

The word has been doing work I never asked it to do. It has been standing in for the parts of me that have not figured out how to talk to people outside this corner. There is a version of me that goes quiet in rooms where nobody knows what a Eurorack module is, that has not learned how to be casually liked by people who do not already share my world. The last time someone introduced me at a dinner outside this corner, I stalled three sentences in and let the conversation drift. Afterward I told myself I do not enjoy that kind of talk. Calling myself niche is more flattering than calling myself underdeveloped. The atrophy gets called preference.

The harder admission concerns the people I went to high school with. Most of them are heading into rooms where they will not have to explain themselves. CS at a place that markets itself by name. Finance at a firm whose initials open doors. AI at a lab whose logo is enough. Whatever they end up doing, the world will already have a category for it, and they will be inside that category instead of trying to describe their way toward it. None of them will end up in niches. Niches are where the people who could not, or would not, fight for the centers tend to land.

A friend put it to me last month. Why keep building parameter-heavy hardware for a few hundred people when mass-market smart guitars are already everywhere. I told him I enjoy it, that I enjoy fiddling and making new sounds. The answer is true. Whether it is the whole truth is another question. Calling my work niche lets me skip the question of which kind of person I actually am. It frames the choice as taste when part of it may be that I did not back myself to compete in the rooms where the explaining is already done for me.

That is one reading of the situation, and I have been writing it without giving the other reading its weight. The corner I work in has a history I have been inside without ever quite naming. The indie web of an older generation ran on small rooms where a few hundred people were enough to sustain entire bodies of work. That kind of belonging is real, and it is part of why I do what I do. The tradition is honest about scale: a few hundred is enough for the work. But a few hundred is not always enough for the person making it. The niche gives me the gift of being understood quickly. What it cannot give me is the experience of being known by someone who did not already understand.

The answer is not to leave the niche. The niche is where I work, around people I trust, with conversations dense enough to feel like home. Leaving it would be a different kind of self-betrayal, the kind that pretends adulthood means abandoning what you care about in exchange for being legible to strangers.

The niche is not the problem. The problem is that I have been letting it speak in rooms where I should have been speaking, and using it to settle a question I have not actually answered. A niche can be a place to live. It cannot be a substitute for the person who lives there, and it cannot be a way of quietly losing arguments I never let myself have. I would rather find out by living the next year than by dressing the question up in a word.