I don't even remember my emulation journey. In 2012 I was gifted my first Android tablet and somehow I immediately decided to use it to play Fire Emblem on GBA. I honestly have zero recollection of why that was my first idea, or when/how I heard of emulation before.

I still had my laptop from the army and don't even remember ever emulating anything on it... though having both a terrible Internet connection and an aging PC does make you super effective at finding how to optimize everything to get these precious few frames-per-seconds, so I guess emulation was a continuation of that. Imahine the 2012 Play Store and it makes sense I wasn't going to play Android games...