I had a fairly rough childhood and was raised by my father who was agnostic. Since he never argued for God to me I then became an atheist fairly early on (probably defining myself as such by the time I was 12 or 13 because religious people were "deluded idiots who are ruining this country, etc." and because of the "evidence" to the contrary as described by our school system.) I was never accepted by my peers throughout most of my post-stepmother years (my stepmother from when I was 7 to 9 years old was unbearably strict and emotionally abusive) which was a stark contrast to the kid I was before she was in my life (a very open, friendly, innocent, loving kid who could make friends with anyone). Because of the things that had happened during those years I probably gained about 10 years of age in cynicism and hate toward people for a good while, but this was masked by my overall happy demeanor towards the people that accepted me (those who didn't I absolutely loathed, the "popular" kids and such.) This lasted throughout all my middle school years up until High School when I began to really desire acceptance from my peers. This included the common "scene" dressing and skinny jeans and underage drinking / partying / drugs, conformity to peer pressure, etc. I had many horrible failure relationships with many people and had a hard time even starting new friendships for quite some time because I was so incredibly judgemental and elitist about who I did and did not befriend, all for the wrong reasons.
So the group of friends I had accumulated were more party / drinking friends that I had no real discernable emotional attachment to and at that point I still had no real reason to know better since these were the only kinds of friends I had had. I've always been a thinker and going forward from these wasted days I began to notice patterns both in my behavior in others that I found appalling but I had no real moral ground to defend my position since my position rested mostly on gut feelings and shame. I was incredibly insecure and when shot down by my peers regarding how I felt, I kept it bottled up, only eeking it out every once in a while in my music but mostly keeping it inside. This tore me up existentially pretty badly and kept me in my constant loop of self-destruction. I got my job at Costco in 2008 and was making far more money than I had ever made before working at Jersey Mike's for minimum wage so I was suddenly capable of buying myself the clothes I wanted, the things I wanted, the drugs I wanted, and still I felt empty. I felt like the "American Dream" I had finally seen a bit of was some kind of sick joke because any enjoyment I felt was purely temporary. Some of the joy became regret the next day (buying 200-300 worth of clothes at once only to realise that I needed to start saving up to move out and live on my own, or at least do something productive with the resources I had). So the cycle continued, on and on and on. The first glimpse I had of light in terms of God and Jesus was meeting my coworker Jeremy who was both incredibly intelligent (which I adored) and incredibly faithful to Christ (which confounded me, as he was so utterly intelligent. I thought "How can this man be so incredibly bright but completely deluded?") Every question or accusation I hurled at him was met with a well-thought and measured response that he was happy to provide.