I have to say the trip started in 2011, when I was having some serious doubts of my faith of choice, Judaism. I was living in Staten Island, NY with my wife and a couple that was friends with my family were having some marital issues. They committed an act in my home that I will not repeat here, but its effect was to shock me senseless. I spent days thinking, "How can someone so committed to HaShem do something so foul? I prayed over it, thought over it, and received no reply, neither in vision nor sign, from anything divine or otherwise. Over months after, I slowly realized that I didn't believe in any gods.
Fast forward six months from that realization, and I was reading Anton LaVey and agreeing with him more than many would like to admit. By the end of 2013, I was definitely Satanist, performing compassion and destruction rituals on the regular. Sometimes the rituals worked. Sometimes they didn't. That implied that the magic that LaVey referred to may not be exactly what he described, since if it were, it'd either work or it wouldn't, consistently.
Fast forward to 2015, I started having visions appearing in my dreams. I was driving down back roads with a man whose face was remarkably similar to the face on the Shroud of Turin(yes, he looked something like a drug addict) while I was explaining my disbelief in Christianity. The dreams would always end the same: He'd look at me and ask, "So, which one of us are you trying to convince?"
I ignored these visions/dreams/whatever you want to call them for another four years, until they came so often, so consistently, that I couldn't ignore them anymore. In one in early 2019, I finally addressed the specter directly with, "I don't think you're my master. I'm not sure who or what you are." I got a reply, "You are one of my tools. When I decide to make use of you, you will not refuse, and you will not fail. Make your peace with this world." I've been seeing that reply on the regular in my sleeping states since. After I left NYC(I may disclose my location later, but not now,) I started looking for a church to attend. I ended up in one of the United Methodist Churches in the area that I landed. This isn't the end, just the crossroads I sit at now.