My SJW journey lasted about 5 years.
I had to rewrite this a few times, but hopefully it's not too lengthy.
It's kind of hard to pinpoint exactly when I got into these groups, but I can say it's due to Tumblr. I spent a few years on Tumblr enjoying myself and finding new friends, there's still a few posts from my early days still up where I'd throw around a couple offensive jokes and used not very politically correct language. I was young, whatever, no big deal.
I found these groups of friends online and in real life who gave me emotional support and they reassured me I was loved. It was very cult-like behavior. I ignored a lot of things they did in the beginning of our friendships because they came to my side when I was at my lows. Overall, I wasn't doing well at home. My new friends encouraged me to vent out my weaknesses, they loved hearing how helpful they were to me. It also gave them a chance to insert their opinions because they knew I was struggling. At one point I dated a troon right at the start of their egg hatching moments. Suddenly I had to start caring about gender. Called myself pansexual and agender, basically reflecting how much I didn't actually really care. That phase went away after a year or so, but I had to keep my views on gender on the down low.
My views of a lot of things had to change to fit the SJW narrative. As extreme as they were, they reminded us they were the only good ones. Especially me being someone who's a person of color, they made me and a lot of other people believe they were the only good people in the world. There was a lot of race fetishism going around, especially the white SJWs who would share articles and opinions nonstop about racism like it was entertaining to know about and would shove the few friends they knew who were people of color into random arguments of the subject. Basically toyed around with us to a point where they guilt tripped us into saying, "Yeah, there's a couple people of my race who give into white supremacy," about friends who showed a hint of disagreement with their racial issues. It felt like white supremacy in its own way, but they just slapped a rainbow sticker on top of it.
I moved onto the racial injustice community shortly after Trump won. This is where I realized the race fetishism of SJWs. We were still technically SJWs, but without the gender and sexuality focus. I still had my other SJW friends, mostly because the aura the racial injustice groups gave off came from a place of wanting to stem away from relying on validation for others and taking matters of justice into our own hands. It was very weird, none of us wanted to make friends, but it was basically a place to learn. I did the whole ordeal of getting into Facebook arguments, posted employers and addresses of racist law enforcement, nurses, random trolls, small business owners...
This community relied on making the biggest reaches one could imagine on racism. The difference from the last group was it wasn't really a power trip, but a way to act more victimized than you actually were. There was infighting as well with other races, mostly making jabs like, "I had instances where people of this race didn't like my race so we shouldn't be nice to all of them just because one person showed they were good." The "Fuck you, here's my PayPal *Beyonce gif*" part of the whole thing turned me away after a few months. Also, the ties with black supremacist groups was something I learned after leaving, but I had some fun figuring out all the big names in groups like BLM and ANTIFA in general were bullshitters. Essentially, I was tired of knowing about racism all the time, it pretty much kept me in a state of paranoia.
I started looking into anti-SJW communities. The place I first found had a hodgepodge of types that in the end just became SJWs themselves. It was odd, but not surprising. I found this website during that time, too.
At this point, I'm just an individual. I realized my identity doesn't matter in the real world and whatever these groups taught me was just a manipulation tactic. I still have a couple close SJW friends, but they're the ones who were toyed around with by the main ones like I was. We reconnected to each other with that and now focus on being legitimate friends, like focusing on our hobbies rather than our identity.
I don't have a need really to label my political stance anymore because everyone's views are different, but at the same time being curious and critical of views is normal. I just know that I try my best to continue being a decent person and stay away from extremists. I'm glad I got out before the commie uprising holy shit.