Personally, I was a left liberal for all my life, but had kinda looked into the abyss of anti-sjw and gamergate stuff, like watching Sargon and Bearing, but hadn't really subscribed to their beliefs, more putting them on as background chatter.
Things changed when I read manufacturing consent, listened to Chomsky and found Chapo at around the end of 2018, at which point I found myself as more an ancom, but Chomsky's talking points on Leninism and the USSR was never as cogent and didn't make as much sense as his other points, so I held skepticism about my beliefs then.
Reading more on theory and history, and looking more into different left tendencies via channels like Rev Left moved me over to be a Marxist, as it made the most sense to me in explaining the current and historical situation. Currently making my way through Lenin and looking more into historical ML states and I've found that I'm pretty comfortable as just a Marxist with ML tendencies rn.
As a Catholic kid in Kentucky I always viewed myself as a (in retrospect) mild fascist. My first memory was watching the CNN coverage of the Gulf War in 1990 which was a oddly patriotic memory that carried me all the way through the 2003 invasion. That falling to shit made me sit back and reflect. Not like I was deeply entrenched in any ideology at that point, it was mostly cosmetic level shit. Around this time a religion teacher of mine remarked that Jesus would be considered a communist nowadays. I had no real idea what communism actually was so I started to look in to it and other political ideas. As a result I slowly morphed in to the guy who wouldn't commit and would say shit like "Fascism/Capitalism and Communism both work in theory, they just forget to account for human nature".
During this time my mother started dating a guy whose whole life was credit card processing and leeching money off people. He had/has more money than I'd ever know what to do with but somehow always found opportunities to complain that he wasn't making enough. This started poking holes in my idea that capitalism was a good thing.
Then I arbitrarily decided to take an Arabic class in college which led to me studying abroad in pre revolution Egypt and backpacking around the middle east and visiting Gaza and the West Bank. That whole process moved me even further left and wanting to engage in politics more. That caused me to become a lanyard carrying legislative intern for the Kentucky legislature. I had asked to be assigned to the most left person there but I guess the committee found the best fit to be a horse farmer from the middle of nowhere who only cared about farm subsidizes and getting God back in school. This guy taught me that the entire process boils down to token gestures and finding ways to indirectly accept gifts from lobbyists (I lived off those cheese, jerky and fruit baskets for half a year). Thought that might just be a flaw of US politics so when a family friend asked me a year later to go to India with him to become an assistant to a PM I jumped at the chance. Should have done some research first since this guy was a piece of work, an ex cricket player who was forced out of the game and took up politics. Ended up bailing on that since I couldn't stand the guy and just tooled around in the previously mentioned family friend's credit card company call center while living on a wealthy farm in a very rural part of India until my scheduled flight home. My belief in electoralism and capitalism's ability to provide for those not already at the top has never recovered.
Since then I went to grad school for public health and focused on disaster response (pandemics, natural disasters, civil wars, etc) which just further highlighted how capitalism doesn't have a proper and ethical response to any of these things. As one would expect after spending all the time, money and energy on grad school I have since had
a high paying important job able to help me pay off those student loans with easea series of low paying unimportant jobs which barely allow me to pay off my loans with enough left over to scrape by. You know, the American Dream - the ultimate radicalizer.Not sure how coherent that was. It was my first time even walking myself through my own political journey.