N° 014Planted 2026

Note · found

Dive Deeper

From Jeremy Culhane's Last Meal (@ 39:41):

You're like, oh, um, yeah, I guess like I never realized that was something that was hurting me from 15 years ago. That every single time I do a show, that little impulse is felt in my body without my head knowing. And that's what triggers this whole thing.

Did you like find that sort of like primordial wound of like, oh, this is where the want to be respected, the want to, uh, be funny. The want to make other people happy to try and make myself happy comes from. There's so many, you know, it's, it's so interesting.

It's a, well. I always picture it not like, where you can dive, you can keep diving deeper and deeper and deeper and it's bottomless, but it's meant to be bottomless. And that's the beauty of it, is that you can keep on diving. It doesn't mean that there's pointlessness to diving. You have to keep on diving because that's the beauty of the journey of being an artist is how deep can you dive into that well, and what do you find there? And then what medium do you use to show the world your beautiful discoveries?

So, the journey of going deep is fun. So if you can land on something, like, I landed on an experience where, when I was in, uh, middle school, my mom, uh, I, it was a harvest festival, Halloween, and I really wanted to be this character Pink. It's a woman that I had made up, not Pink, the musician. It was just a woman I had made up that I thought was like, this is awesome. This is funny. It was like early drag basically was what I was doing. We went to Aardvarks, which was this old like costume place. She found me like a, a beautiful, funny gown. We put on a big wig and I went to my Catholic school and I thought it was gonna crush.

I thought like, this is so fun and funny and I'm, I became her. And I got, every single person looked at me different than I'd never been looked at in my life. From kids to parents. Parents were looking at me going like, don't talk to him right now. And that's something that we landed on of like, oh, that was so deeply affecting the psyche of who I, and how I present forever. That it was like, oh my God. Like, there's this part of me that loved dressing in drag. There's this part of me that loved embracing femininity wholly. Yeah. I'm not trans. I've definitely thought that whole experience and there's a beauty to that. I don't personally feel trans. But there is a part of me that is so deeply feminine that I think everybody has. Yeah. That Catholic society and all society really doesn't let us embrace, you know?

So. I think like investigating that gender identity and performance, especially as to alpha males and I'm dead serious, is really, really important and something that we don't grow up being taught. Absolutely. And so that was a core memory of going, there's this whole part of me, this whole fun and it was so fun. It was so joyous. It wasn't guilt-ridden. And then society had made it guilt-ridden and shamed that going through the process of diving deep in discovering that very specific moment has made this other whole feminine part of me explode and embrace and re-remember the joy that I felt through that femininity.

And I love it. And that is only the beginning of going like, oh, that was a core moment. What are all the things that led to that? And what are all the other moments connected with, me not ever feeling, feeling guilty when I experience joy. Which I think is a very modern thing, is if you feel joy, you feel guilt because other people aren't having it.

An old journal entry from 2005, a Go Deeper image of a scuba diver seen from below and thoughts surrounding it at that time, but in a new context now outside of the strictly religious interpretation that always felt too limiting.

10,000 Emerald Pools by Børns

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