For those of you who have actually experienced this for real, please share your experience.
Well, I guess I qualify.
I was essentially born in and was raised with the beliefs but even as a kid I had questions whose answers didn't really make sense. Such as when I wondered about all the children and babies of so called "wicked tribes" that were slaughtered in the name of YHWH and those that died in the flood. I reasoned that these were innocent and were executed for no better reason than being born to "wicked" people and not because they were deserving. Even then I found it a bit hard to imagine every person in the world other than Noah's family were beyond redemption and forgiveness. Why would a loving god do or command such things? As a kid I questioned and the answers didn't make sense, this problem of evil. There seemed to be much that was just accepted and not discussed, such as the creation account and Adam/Eve being at apparent odds with evolution and the fossil record (I was big into dinosaurs and the history of animals)
As a teenager, such questions festered and caused me some amount of distress as more blatent and obvious inconsistencies arose. Tthe nature of god, jesus, angels and demons, all of which there seemed no real evidence for other than hearsay. The number of different beliefs based on the same book and the number of non christian beliefs had me questioning why I thought what I believed was true. Why any of it was true. It seemed there was an evolution of belief as well. Why would god confuse his children so? Again the problem of evil reared it ugly head when considering the immient destruction of the vast majority of humankind, and again I reasoned that not all non witnesses were deserving of destruction for no better reason than not being witnesses. By this time I had a bit more experience and knew people that I didn't think deserved such a fate. And of course, being a teenager I yearned for a path to make my own and rebelled against the fate I was told was inevitable.
Anywho, I made up my mind that whatever the result I wanted no part of the fate foretold by desert nomads. I moved out when I turned 18 and stopped going to meetings, over a short period of time. I made friends and dated whomever I wished. I did drugs and partied hard. I learned to play bass guitar and played in hard rock bands. I never looked back, though I was in a hall twice since age 20, once for a memorial and once for my brother's baptism (he's since left as well). This was by the mid 80s, well before the internet, I never read any "apostate" literature or met another xjw until around 2004, when I joined a meetup group, then this site.
So, I basically just decided to live a life I wanted and roll the dice. LIke anyone.