Hello, baby Marxist here!
Personally mine was reading.
When I was a liberal I loathed reading and found it hard to even read a short article. I rarely researched everything I heard, and as a teenager, I was like every other liberal, getting my news off social media.
Now I make sure to research everything, however, getting into theory is a bit hard. Most of the information I learned about communism was through fellow comrades, because like before, I got my information from other people’s comments.
Currently I’m restoring my motivation for reading by starting small. Reading long comments from comrades helped a lot. I’ve now moved on to reading information from leftist sources without effort, and I’m starting on reading the communist manifesto.
Enough about me, what were your side effects?
Racism, was one of those “they’re too loud” folks when it came to gay people, I believed all diversity was forced and taking away from whites who actuall “tried”, I belived in destroying China, I had weird dreams of going to korea and revolting against the government (sorry kim I love you), had really sus opinions on the 3rd Reich (one of those history bros), and I was a lazy fuck.