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?
Sorry for this massive list of cringe, there’s more stuff but that’s what I remember now.
I’ve always liked reading news and fiction works but I actively avoided reading any books on political theory or philosophy because the jargon can be pretty heavy. I still prefer audiobooks but at least I’m reading marxist books now lol.
Conflating socialist “dictatorships” with actual dictatorships because I live in one and mistakenly thought that there would be no change from that. That pushed me in a socdem corner for a few years despite being unsatisfied with that ideology.
Self hatred because I thought only Europeans were capable of “true democracy” and having a secular state. I had an anti-theist phase because I thought religion was the source of all woes and that getting rid of it would produce an ideal world. To be fair it is a source for a lot of problems but not the primary contradiction, I still don’t like organized religion because of how it negatively affects my life and others as well. I’m aware religion can be used for revolutionary purposes as well as reactionary ones so I’m no longer anti religion as long as reactionary tendencies are curbed.
Wishing America would come “liberate” us from everything bad in my country… Yeah that was mega cringe and I don’t look fondly on that time at all, very glad I’m no longer like that.
Briefly believing rainbow capitalism could improve our situation in my country and also buying into Israel’s pinkwashing and very briefly considering moving there. Egyptians leaving for Israel is considered treason by nearly everyone here.