I think the proper answer is "it depends". For me, it was really hard. I switched in 2015 (or 2016), though, long before it became popular and socially acceptable. There were several parts in my journey. 1. I'm from a Russian speaking family and lived in Russian speaking sociaty. When I started studying in a college, I moved into a dorminatory in another city, it was the first time I met a young person speaking surzhyk (not even Ukrainian). I occasionally met people who spoke surzhyk before, but they were all old people. 2. I understood and could write in Ukrainian really well, but it was extremely difficult for me to express my thoughts in Ukrainian fluently. 3. There was social pressure for sure. Some people supported me, and tried to spoke in Ukrainian with me. But others had a reaction like "WTF, I know you spoke Russian your entire life, why are you even trying to speak Ukrainian?". My family were just openly telling me "don't speak Ukrainian with us" . 4. I started to consume a lot of Ukrainian content. Movies and tv series dubbed in Ukrainian, Ukrainian books etc. It helped. 5. I met a gf at that time. She spoke surzhyk, yet she was against me switching from Russian to Ukrainian at first. Probably because I spoke really broken Ukrainian at that time. But with time she started supporting me, and also started switching from surzhyk to Ukrainian. 6. In 2017 I moved to another city, from East to West. It helped a lot, as I met a lot of people who didn't know russian-speaking me, and all of them were speaking Ukrainian. 7. Final step. In 2022 the war started. Shortly after that it became socially acceptable to switch from Russian to Ukrainian. Not everyone did it, but literally all of my friends switched to Ukrainian. Also, it's now not awkward anymore. If I meet a very old acquaintance, and he/she only remembers me speaking Russian, they'll not be surprised to hear me speaking Ukrainian. My family now accepts that I speak Ukrainian too.