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

The line frames “feeling exceptional” as not a harmless personality quirk but a psychologically corrosive stance. Wallace often treats the conviction that one is uniquely intelligent or different as a trap: it isolates a person from ordinary human solidarity, feeds self-consciousness and comparison, and can harden into contempt or despair when reality fails to confirm the self-image. Read this way, the speaker is describing a near-fatal collision between ego and vulnerability—suggesting that recovery (or survival) requires relinquishing the fantasy of specialness in favor of humility, connection, and a more compassionate self-understanding.