Before I tell you about my qualifications, let me tell you why any of this matters to me.

I grew up in Bulgaria, raised in large part by my grandparents. My grandfather was in his late seventies by then. He was retired, unhurried and entirely present in a way I didn't fully understand until much later. He taught me to read at four and a half. He took me to the library. He read to me in Bulgarian, and then, and this is the part that changed everything, he read to me in Russian. And we translated together. Word by word. Sentence by sentence.

Two languages, one story, one small girl utterly transfixed.

One of our favourite books was The Tale of Tsar Saltan by Alexander Pushkin. I still remember the feeling of holding two versions of the same story inside me at once and being completely, helplessly fascinated by the idea that the world I know exists just behind a different language - the same, but also very different.

My grandfather gave me two windows to look through. And once you have two, you understand there could be many more.

I have spent my entire life following that understanding.

Through a difficult adolescence, languages were my anchor and my escape. They were the proof, when I needed it most, that the world was bigger than the one I was living in. That there was a lot more ‘out there’ than the difficulties i had to cope with. I collected penpals from Brasil, Finland, Japan, Germany, France, the United States, England, Scotland, the Netherlands, Mauritius, Australia, Papua New Guinea. They were not just pen friends. They were living evidence that these other worlds I was dreaming of were real and very reachable.

When I finished the English language high school in my home town in Bulgaria, I went on to study at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, where I completed a Master’s degree in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics. I trained as an English language teacher and then earned my Cambridge CELTA, a Teaching English to Young Learners certificate and a Postgraduate Certificate in Education in Teaching Multilingual Learners from Oxford Brookes University.

I also happen to be a mother of two multilingual children, who remain my most honest and, mind you, least filtered source of feedback.

And through all of it, the thread that never broke was this:

Language is never just about words.

In this work, what people bring me aren’t just questions about language strategy. They bring identity, grief, guilt, hope, fear and love. They bring the weight of wanting to give their children everything and the exhaustion of not knowing if what they're doing is enough.

I bring the research. The methodology. The practical tools.

But I also bring something harder to name - the ability to see between the layers. To hear what's underneath the question being asked. To name the thing that hasn't been said yet and hand it back gently so that people can finally exhale.

People sometimes get emotional in my workshops and talks. I used to not know what to do with that. Now I understand it as relief; the specific relief of being truly seen on something that has been carried alone for too long.

That is the work. And I love it deeply because it matters more than a lot of people realise. 

Multilingual lives come in every shape. My work does too.