“You coming to my client’s appointment? I’ll give you free shoes!”

I shook my head and emailed back that I couldn’t make it, but thanks for the invite. I was “simplifying.” That’s my response to invitations these days. “Thank you, but no. I’m in the midst of simplifying.” Somehow, the answer makes sense to publicists.

It isn’t a lie; it’s just me avoiding a more honest explanation for why I’m opting out. And in some ways, it’s true: I don’t need more shoes, even free ones. I just gave away half of the ones I already own, including an amazing pair of pink suede Miu Mius. Because what I’m looking for these days, I’m not going to find at a fashion event. My real reaction to the invite? I can’t handle going to your party, because I’m burnt out and coming out of the fog of grief and have no idea what I’d be doing there. Yeah, “simplifying” sounds much better.

I started working in fashion in 1999 and I’ve been going to industry parties — and collecting my gift bag — for years since. It was fun! I loved being in fashion because I loved shiny, pretty things. They made me feel good. If something in my life wasn’t going right (a crappy romance, being broke again, not feeling thin enough), I bought something to make me feel better — on credit, of course. Fashion and shopping, and the glamour of it all, made my troubles go away. It was as simple as that. I remember when a magazine I worked for threw a party, I ran to Barneys to buy a gorgeous pair of Marc Jacobs metallic heels just for that night. It was shallow and fun and completely wasteful. It was everything I wanted to be.

Pretty things filled the voids in my life: I had no real personal life, my friends were too busy working as hard as I was to spend any quality time together, and my family was thousands of miles away. I loved (and hated) fiercely committing to my jobs, feeling stressed out, and being a drama queen. But I never handled stress well, and all the long nights and weekends required by the early days of digital began to take a toll. I managed to ignore the signs: the exhaustion, the illnesses, the migraines. On weekends, I couldn’t get off the sofa. But still I worked like an idiot and didn’t exercise enough, eat well, or meditate. My dad — a psychiatrist who saw what was happening to me — would caution me to take it easy, to hit the gym. I just laughed.

As in most tales about a ridiculously shallow person, it all came crashing down one day — but not in the way I was expecting. When I was 33, my mother was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. The worst of the worst of the cancers. And I felt the world stop. My mother, who used to make my clothes for me. Whose jewelry I’d played with. Whose Mary Kay makeup was too pale for me, so my made-up face always looked like a zombie. (She hated that.)

When I was a young girl, my mother would take me shopping whenever I took sick days, fever be damned. She started me on the path of using fashion as a feel-good remedy, and she was so thrilled when I got my first real job in the industry as an assistant at Vogue. Over the years, whenever I started hating a job, or wanted to quit, it was my mother who kept me going. I loved making her proud of me — hearing her brag to her friends in Texas that I was a fashion editor, watching her put my business cards on the fridge. She once came to New York and threatened to beat up my boss for making me work too hard. I’m 99% sure she was joking, but then she did have a black belt in karate. My mother was my reason for everything. And now I was losing her.

I remember sitting at a resort show in New York in 2011. I had been working at a small startup website, and my mom had just been diagnosed. I scored a seat in the second row, and as I watched the clothes come out, my anxiety started to rise. I wasn’t usually prone to panic attacks, and here I was having one in front of everyone. What the hell was I doing at a fashion show when my mom was sick? Who cared about all this? I had to get out of there, to run.