I wouldn't say it's the best essay but as someone native in Dutch, almost-native in English and having cursory knowledge of three other languages and two dialects, I find the topic of language and identity fascinating.
Yes, to the extent of "different". Native languages parse through the emotional center of our brains whille non-native ones parse through the reasoning part. This makes decision-making in different in non-native language; it's also the reason you read a speech in the listeners' native language if you want to have a higher chance of them agreeing with you. Personally, I find myself more reasonable and critically thinking when speaking in English (which includes internal dialogue). I'm able to push through emotionally-stressful situations easier when conversing about them in English. It doesn't change my perception of what is emotionally stressful; I guess it parses the situation slightly differently.Are We Different People in Different Languages?
Let's play bingo: English is young/bastard language [✓] Tamil pandering [✓] Loanword confusion [✓] "efficient" [✓] Nah, it was pretty good other than that. Didn't have much to do with the title (or linguistic relativism), though.
I've had to sort of get back into thinking about this question recently-- I also find it really interesting, but when I was first getting into linguistics, /r/linguistics was totally populated (at least as far as I saw) with people who just totally derided linguistic relativism, so for a while I didn't think it was even a debate. But now I'm hearing more and more people saying that it may not be that cut and dry, not to mention my own experience being semi-fluent in two languages now. So I guess I'm just thinking about language more in general. More thoughts to come once I read the actual article :)