The Golden Threads

On building a business that doesn't cost you your life

I stood beside the river, my fingers trailing in the cold water. When I lifted my hand, golden threads streamed from my fingertips—glimmering, dripping, clinging to me as if they belonged there.

I froze. Not out of fear, more like shock, the kind of astonishment that demands absolute stillness. I tilted my hand and the threads shifted with me, stretching between my fingers like honeyed light. I hesitated, unsure if I was supposed to be touching whatever this was. But instinct moved me before thought did. I brought my other hand closer.

The threads followed.

They reached and twined between both palms—not metaphorically, not as imagery. Literally. I laughed, an involuntary bubbling up, half delight, half disbelief, because it felt absurd and sacred all at once. As I moved my hands, the threads wove themselves into shape. Not fully defined, not finished, but undeniably real. It felt like I was pulling possibility into form.

When I woke, it stayed with me like a memory that had already happened. My fingers remembered the texture. My chest remembered the warmth. All day, I caught myself reaching for something invisible.

That night I went back to sleep hoping I’d return to the river.

I did.

Only this time, I wasn’t alone.

My lover stood beside me at the riverbank. We didn’t speak. We didn’t need to. We dipped our hands into the current together and lifted them in unison.

This time the threads didn’t just appear—they multiplied. Gold. Then silver. Then red. Then blue. Then iridescent colors I don’t have names for. They didn’t simply glow; they sang. And weaving with someone beside me felt different—stronger, truer—like the river had been waiting not for a single voice but for harmony.

That’s when I knew in my bones:

We are not meant to build anything real alone.

I didn’t honor the dream initially, but it lived on inside me.

At one point, I was juggling more than ten clients at once, holding their launches, their growth plans, their crises, their dreams. I was the scaffolding propping up everyone else’s visions.

Meanwhile, my own life was becoming a blur of deadlines and late-night Slack messages. I worked after dinner while my children played in the next room. I worked on weekends instead of retreating to the woods. I ignored the tightness in my chest and the ache in my bones. I told myself I was grateful because this is what “making it” looks like, right?

But if I was succeeding, why did it feel like loss?
Why did I wake up with the sensation of grief lodged beneath my ribs—grief for the hours I spent working instead of living, grief for the aliveness I was trading for approval?

I had been given instruction, and I ignored it. Because the world told me to be reasonable.

Then came the year that changed everything.

My dearest friend was in the hospital. Glioblastoma, aka brain cancer. One of those diagnoses that rearranges every hierarchy of importance in a single sentence.

I sat beside him, watching the rise and fall of his chest, trying to memorize the way his hand felt in mine. He looked at me with startling clarity and said,

“Don’t waste your life working. Live it. I know you—you’re loyal to a fault. But you need to live for you. Enjoy life. Travel. Do the things you love.”

I didn’t answer. I just took his hand and cried, because I knew he was right. And I knew I didn’t yet know how to do it.
In that moment I didn’t want success. I didn’t want growth. I didn’t want anything except more time with him.

That moment didn’t instantly change me. I didn’t walk out of that hospital and become a different person overnight. Real change doesn’t arrive like thunder; at least not for me. It arrives like water. It seeps. It erodes. It wears down the old beliefs grain by grain.

But after that day, I could no longer pretend I didn’t know the truth.

I had made so many unconventional choices over the years. I had already walked away from what I was supposed to want. But I was still treating work like the most important thing. Still grinding. Still proving something.

My intuition had always been smarter than my strategy.

I had spent years pretending it wasn’t. Years pretending that instinct needed to justify itself to data. Years dismissing the very voice that had been trying to protect me. Years ignoring the dream that showed me exactly how to live.

Capitalism trains us to live as separate entities. My output. My worth. My grind. My metrics. It teaches us that exhaustion is noble, rest is indulgent, and tenderness is inefficient. It rewards disconnection—from our bodies, from our communities, from anything that cannot be monetized.

It splits the head from the heart and calls that professional.
It tells us to be machines, then tries to sell us “self-care” when the wiring starts to fray.

It taught me to treat business like the most important thing—something I do without ceasing, something separate from my children’s laughter, my lover’s touch, the quiet before sleep. Something that is the only thing of value.

But the dream knew better.

The golden threads don’t only appear at the river. They’re here, in every choice, in every moment we decide what actually matters.

Annie Murphy Paul calls it the extended mind—the idea that thinking doesn’t live only in the brain. It happens through movement, through landscape, through relationship. I didn’t need neuroscience to confirm that. My clearest ideas rarely come when I sit down to “think.” They arrive while I’m walking in the woods, stirring soup, mid-laugh when someone says something that lands like lightning.

Wisdom doesn’t come from force. It comes from contact.

Thinking is not solitary. And neither is living.

Bell hooks wrote, “Love is an action, never simply a feeling.” She also said, “The moment we choose love, we begin to move against domination.”

Love, then, is not softness. It is refusal—refusal to exploit myself, refusal to treat people as “targets” or “audiences,” refusal to act like care is optional.

So, if I truly want to build a life—and a business—beyond domination, love cannot sit in the margins. It has to be the operating system, built into how I price, how I schedule, how I respond when I disappoint myself, how I end the day.

So here I am, choosing differently.

Not perfectly. Not yet consistently. But more honestly than before.

Sometimes it looks like letting something be 80% complete if the other 20% would demand my wellbeing as collateral.

Sometimes it looks like making payment plans the same price as pay-in-full, because most of the time, charging extra isn’t about admin costs—it’s about hierarchy.

Sometimes it looks like honoring my gut, even when there isn’t a spreadsheet to validate it.

Sometimes it looks like kissing my spouse goodnight instead of answering one more email.

Sometimes it looks like making dinner with my children instead of optimizing a funnel.

This isn’t messaging. It isn’t positioning. It’s not even advice.

It’s just recognizing that business isn’t separate from life. That every choice is a thread. That we’re always weaving something.

The only question is: what are we building?

I don’t have a grand thesis to end this with. I’m still figuring it out.

But I keep going back to the river in my dreams. I keep feeling the threads between my fingers. And I keep remembering the moment when someone else dipped their hand into the current beside mine—and everything changed.

The magic isn’t somewhere else. It isn’t waiting for the right moment or the perfect strategy.

It’s here. In everyday choices. In the refusal to split yourself in half. In the decision to build a business that doesn’t cost you your life.

The golden threads are real.

You’re weaving them right now.

The only question is: are you weaving alone, exhausted, grinding against yourself?

Or are you weaving with love, with rest, with the people who matter, with your own aliveness intact?

That’s the magic.
That’s the work.

x-Carmen