The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.

...logical validity is not a guarantee of truth.

Perhaps this is what it means to go mad: to be emptied and to be aware of the emptiness.

America, as everybody knows, is a country of many contradictions, and a big contradiction for a long time has been between a very aggressive form of capitalism and consumerism against what might be called a kind of moral or civic impulse.

In reality, genuine epiphanies are extremely rare. In contemporary adult life maturation & acquiescence to reality are gradual processes. Modern usage usually deploys epiphany as a metaphor. It is usually only in dramatic representations, religious iconography, and the 'magical thinking' of children that insight is compressed to a sudden blinding flash.

My chest bumps like a dryer with shoes in it.

To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.