I got out of Pokemon almost entirely for 12 years. I was 11 / 12 years old during the original craze. I was pretty obsessed at the time, watching the anime and playing the games every day. Not to mention, collecting every card from Base Set, Jungle and Fossil (with most of the Team Rocket cards).
Then, a couple of things happened that started to hurt my interest in Pokemon. First, two kids in my neighborhood, whom I traded cards with quite a bit, stole all of the holos out of my card binder. I don't even know how they did it. I remember opening my binder and just being heartbroken seeing everything missing. Their dad was an abusive drunk anyway, so it's not like he would have made them give me the cards back. (The cards which I could identify from specific scratches)
I tried replacing all of those cards, but it's kind of hard for a 12 year old with no money to do... It was kind of depressing. After a while, I just gave up basically. Not to mention, I was in 7th grade now, Junior High and it suddenly wasn't "cool" to like Pokemon. All of my friends who were part of the craze as well out of the blue started making fun of anything Pokemon. I gave in to the peer pressure and started to drift away from Pokemon.
Sure, I bought Pokemon Gold on it's release date and played the heck out of it for a very long time (secretly, mind you, so my friends wouldn't know). But I was done collecting cards, because I didn't want my friends to poke fun at me for it. Pretty pathetic, I know.
Even when Neo Genesis came out a couple of months later, I was tempted to start buying them, but I resisted. Still to this day, I've never owned any of the Neo cards. I haven't even seen 90% of the card images.
The whole thing is kind of sad to me. I wish back then, I wouldn't have cared what people said, especially my friends, and continued to collect the cards. I still remember how it was impossible to find cards in stores around this time. Then my mom, bless her heart, found the 'Starter Set' at a random Kohl's store (which is weird that they had it) and surprised me with it. And finally a few weeks later, the local toy store got a large shipment of Base Set cards in.
I remember walking around with a handful of packs, waiting for my mom to get there to buy them, because I didn't want people to come in and buy them all before it was too late. They were $5 a pack at that store and time, so my mom bought me 3 packs. I remember looking through them, so happy to find them and so amazed at what I got. And then, just over a year later, I was getting out of collecting cards. Grrrr.
By the time Gens 3 and 4 were released, I was completely out of Pokemon. I remember seeing the cards in stores and laughing at how ridiculous the newer Pokemon looked (which I still feel that way about most of Gens 3, 4 and 5). I did buy LeafGreen however and absolutely loved it. But still wasn't hooked again.
Sorry for the long rant. I got carried away talking about it! But fast forward to mid 2013, and my daughter (who was 3 at this time) caught a glimpse of Pokemon somewhere and started asking me about it. She kept bringing up someone named "Achu", talking about Pikachu of course. She wanted to know more and more about it. I bought her a couple of packs of cards, and showed her a few old episodes of the anime.
That's when I realized that through my daughter, I was kind of reliving what I went through those years ago. I loved seeing her excitement and interest grow, much like mine had. Because of her falling in love with it herself, I found myself doing the exact same thing, again. A few months later, I bought Pokemon X and then saw that the XY card series would be released soon. Ended up buying a booster box and both trainer boxes.
The enthusiasm, excitement and joy she got from opening all of those was just incredible. It's now something we collect together (and watch the anime together). Truly something that we have further bonded over.