I'm back, political-ish.
I also ended up learning more about real history, you know not the blatant propaganda I got taught in high school.
That made me, finally, actually want to learn about Marxism. And I discovered that I had been approaching it as a resolution to my intellectual discontent with my "native" liberalism anyway, e.g. as someone trained in biology I was approaching a "dialectical materialist" understanding of biological phenomenon, embracing complexity and change.
(cont.)