You need to buy a new outfit. Find a store with windows disguised in conformity. Pale mannequins left in a huddle, playing a circuitous game of telephone. Remind yourself that you are just looking around. See an okay dress slouched on a sharp hanger and get in line, like a thief bored again with his plunder.

Wait behind a gaggle of teenage girls. Glance down at the blonde hair on their fawning legs, and remember that you wrote a do-to list the night before your first date, age fourteen. Tweeze eyebrows, condition hair. He reached his arm around you, to fiddle ice-cream thumbs on the stuffed animal claw prize machine. It meant less or more than when he placed his hand over her’s to show off a putting grip.

Don’t make your decision, text a friend. The pang of fitting room light is dully severe, your mouth stark in the hurried photo. A misguided pin-up. Would this work for tomorrow? And immediately, yes. Vaguely doubt her abrupt agreement.

Get distracted near the register by a display of folded scarves, uneven with pleats like soft ears, or a coffee-ringed magazine’s curled edge, and wonder for a moment if your last email was more eager than not. Desperate, even. That exclamation point should have landed as a period. Feel a red clench behind your stomach as you enter the pin for your debit card. Don’t take the subway. Wander home instead, and think about cooking dinner.

top at the less organic grocery store. Buy three yogurts, a sweet potato. Grab some paper towels too, you could be running low. Judge the couple placed next to you in the flickering aisle. The lazy arguments of comfort lull between his lopsided socks and her complacent shorts. But then – a hand on a back, or a slight finger squeeze. Wonder what exactly you are judging.

Hang up the dress in your bathroom, the wrinkles will unravel in shower steam. Read the morning’s news, and tell your friends you are nervous just so they will tell you there is no reason to be. Try on one pair of heels, and then another. Stand unevenly in front of the mirror. Toss a circle of bright hope onto something you know nothing about. Reach with your left foot for the hairbrush fallen under the bed. Are you an earring person, or a bracelet person? Forget that it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.

Arrive late, breathless with unnecessary hand movements. Be exciting, be serious. Give meaning to each contagious pause, the distinct position of feet. Keep talking, fill the silence with your self. You don’t wear t-shirts twice before washing, or eat the stray chip dropped on the floor as you stand idly, underwear-clad in your kitchen, scratching at a mosquito bite with your big toe. Look down, your story is foreign in your own fingers. Be smart, be fun. You have no stray hairs. Be exhausted.

Leave, and feel the wake of your frantic exertion, the pliable antimatter that your efforts have left behind. Want to curl up inside your ribs. Redraw the conversation into an opera with seven plodding acts. Cull the insignificant syllables, roll the extra vowels on the back of your tongue. Know that you are being unduly, overly, hilariously dramatic. And yet, be dramatic.

Compose a thank you, and sit still next to the silence that follows. Tell your friends either way, it’s not a big deal.

Find a song that explains: I’m better than feeling sad, and also — I am very sad. Half dance around your apartment to this for a bit. Leave three times to buy gum, get coffee, stand outside. The delicate gravity of an empty hour sculpts twenty four clear arcs that mean a day.

Think about the difference between an email and a phone call. A phone call with a voicemail? Text yourself, quickly, to be sure that technology is still working. Be disappointed in your own missive, a pristinely mirrored hello. Hello! Don’t remember that everyone else in the world is also a human.

Last week, I went to my very first jewelry event: The Antique Jewelry and Art Conference, which the organizers lovingly refer to as Jewelry Camp. I almost didn’t attend: it was two full days , a decent amount of money (money that could have been put towards my company!), and apart from it being about jewelry, it seemed so far away from what I’m doing: launching a direct-to-consumer high-end necklace line. So I thought “what if there isn’t any good networking?”

In the world of launching my business, working full-time and attempting to hang out with humans other than myself, all while finding moments to just sit on the sofa and read, I confronted every coffee meeting, event and email with a clinical “is it worth it?”assuming that each choice either helped me or distracted me, that there was a right and a wrong, that life must be lived in a linear fashion, pointed towards a pinnacle of success.

I don’t think that I’m the only one: every day, we’re tweeted a Buzzfeed story or emailed some Medium (hi!) piece about maximizing our time, about the 10 Habits of Billionaire Founders Under 20, about the 2 hour work week, and a belief sets in that we will make it, that our company or career will be successful if we can just remember to check our email only at 10am and 4pm and meditate each morning. Our life shows a tinge of worry around the edges and the weird things in our sketchbooks get a little boring.

Thankfully, the fear that I might miss out on a valuable moment overcame the fear that I might be wasting time and I think that also, a tiny forgotten part of me told me to just go. So, I got on Metro North at 7am. I didn’t meditate that morning. It was okay.

There were no potential investors there or ecommerce masterminds, and I left with a grand total of four business cards, but I spent two days surrounded by people – collectors, historians, appraisers, women who simply love jewelry – who are obsessed with the very thing that I’m obsessed with. We flipped through rare books about 1960s costume jewelry, touched filigree dies from a 1920s factory in Providence, and learned that rhinestones were originally pieces of quartz discovered along the Rhine River. That feeling of finding my home, of settling into myself, was the most satisfying moment I’ve had since I decided to start a company over a year ago.

If you’re a new entrapraneur or designer or you’re bored in your career but just realized you love cooking or you just landed your dream job, go be in your new world. Find people who inspire you and hang out with them. Even though many of our pursuits — founding a startup, designing a collection, starting a blog — are inherently solitary, you can’t create incredible work in isolation. Take the time to attend events, go to classes, walk around shows and immerse ourselves. It will bring passion back to what you do and remind you of who you are, and without that understanding, success is impossible.