Experiences to Help Ground Yourself

What kind of experiences have you sought out, before and after leaving the church, in order to help you gain some semblance of what normal feels like - what the real world feels like to normal people? I live in the South so I feel like most of the people around me haven't done much in the way of worldly experiences, if they're churchgoers, anyway. Even though I'm out of the church, pretty much all of my friends are different denominations of Christian, so none of them really do anything I wouldn't have done as an Adventist besides non-Sabbath keeping.