Bilingual friend

Hello, my name is Cecília and I've always been the only bilingual friend in the group. All my friends in school only knew portuguese and when it was time for english classes I was the center (centre in British English, depends what you prefer!) of attention (centre of the world doesn't sound too natural for me, but does make perfect since still.). When the test was in pairs, everyone wanted to sit with me (even those who had never looked me in the eyes); when the teacher started speaking in english, I was always her translator because nobody understood english.

A bad habit that I've developed is being upset when corrected, just because when I spell something wrong my friends never noticed and never corrected me. I just need to sound "american" or "british" to pretend I'm speaking english.

When I first attended private english classes, my classmates had been students in that school since childhood; but I just did a placement test and "skipped over" (to me skipped sounds more natural, but I guess jumped does work too!) lots of steps, attending just 6 months. My grades in public school were always perfect (I'm not kidding, I always got everything right and that's because it was easy and not because I'm proficient in this language). But in the private english classes, I've got some "average" grades, since the difficulty was higher.

When I first got corrected by a teacher on iTalki, I was like "did I say something wrong? How? I've never said anything wrong in english!". Obviously, she was way more experienced than me and she lived abroad; I'm just not used to being corrected and she did nothing wrong, my teacher was only doing her job.

Now this bad habit of mine is going away little by little. I'm not upset anymore when corrected. Now I think: I've always been the bilingual friend, but at this moment I've discovered that I don't really know english and I'm not "bilingual" like I thought I was.

I hope to one day become fluent and live abroad, to be proud of myself and be able to say to everyone that I'm finally and officially bilingual.