They Walk Among Us

Stop Apologising For Existing

I was watching one of those old science fiction films the other night — the kind where aliens have been living undetected among humans for years, hiding in plain sight, going about their business while everyone else remains completely oblivious. The humans pass them on the street, sit next to them on the bus, shake their hands at conferences, and have absolutely no idea. And I thought, well. That sounds familiar.

Now, I am sure you are wondering what on earth extraterrestrials have to do with your freelance education business. Bear with me!

We are the ones hiding in plain sight. We — the online freelance educators — have been here for years, quietly getting on with it, building our client lists, running back-to-back lessons across time zones, adapting our materials in real time, troubleshooting the tech, managing the admin, doing the marketing, writing the lesson plans, and somehow still showing up energised for the next session. All of it, from a spare bedroom or a kitchen table or a little apartment in Italy. All of it, without a single colleague popping their head round the door to say well done.

And yet, if you were to walk into a certain kind of university faculty meeting or ELT conference, you might not mention any of that. You might hedge a little. Downplay it, perhaps. Say you “do some teaching online” in the same apologetic tone you might use to confess you have not done your homework. Because somewhere along the line, a lot of us absorbed the message that what we do is somehow less — less rigorous, less professional, less worthy of the name.

Here is what I actually think, for what it is worth: we are more agile, more responsive, and more technically resourced than any classroom teacher I have encountered. I say this not to start a fight — I am not the font of all knowledge, and I am certainly not interested in a shouting match — but because I went back into a physical classroom recently, without my technology, and I genuinely could not believe how difficult it was. The flexibility I had taken entirely for granted — the ability to pull up a resource in seconds, to adapt on the fly, to share, annotate, record, respond — was simply gone. I felt like I had been asked to cook a three-course meal with no hob.

And yet… many of us are still apologising for existing.

So here is what I want to ask you — not as a challenge, but as a genuine question worth sitting with for a moment — why are you still hiding? You have built something real. You have clients who come back. You have a skill set that took years to develop. You have survived the chaos of building a business entirely on your own, online, often in a second or third language environment, with no HR department, no sick pay and no one to cover your lessons when the internet goes down.

That is not nothing. That is quite a lot, actually!

The alien metaphor breaks down here, of course, because the whole point of the science fiction version is that the creatures do not want to be discovered. They are hiding for a reason. But you? You have no reason to hide. The only thing keeping you out of sight is the story you have been quietly telling yourself about whether what you do counts.

It counts. Get your head out of the sand, own what you have built, and let people see it. Not for the academic establishment’s approval — frankly, you can give that a wide swerve — but because the people who need you cannot find you if you are busy making yourself invisible.

They walk among us. Time to step out of the shadows.

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I am genuinely curious — when did you last tell someone, without hedging, what you actually do and what it took to build it? Think about it. Then come and tell me in the comments. Because if you cannot say it here, in a room full of people who already get it, we have work to do.

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