I grew up in a monolingual family. My parents speak only Finnish, and in my childhood
 I had very few real-life experiences with any other language.

However, I spent countless hours online from early on, and the online community
 I was part of used English. In order to interact with strangers, I had to start using English as well.

I was uncomfortable at first about how it would play out or if I would fail because I wasn’t a native
speaker. But despite my fears, everything went smoothly.

Over the years, I’ve become friends with a lot of people from all around the world. Finnish may be my first language, but a percentage of my identity is definitely English-speaking.