THE STORY BEHIND NE3ULA
ORIGIN
I started asking who I wanted to become before I understood what becoming meant.
CHAPTER 01 — THE FIRST NAME I CHOSE
BE → EB
My name is Jesse. But the story of NE3ULA began before the music, technology, symbols, or name. It began with a question I started asking as a child: Who am I—and who do I choose to become? When I was five years old, I was asked what my nickname was. Instead of simply choosing a shortened version of my given name, I stopped and wondered why I needed another name. My given name had been chosen for me—but if I could choose a name for myself, what should it represent? Beneath that childhood question was something much larger: Who do I want to be? I chose EB—the word “BE” written backward—as a reminder to continue seeking the answer to that question. EB was never merely an alter ego. It became a container for a question I was still too young to fully articulate—the question of identity, authorship, and becoming. The name evolved over time. It appeared in different forms, including Ebakis and Ebenezer. Later, it became connected to the identities, musical aliases, creative projects, symbols, and systems I used to explore different parts of myself. Beneath every variation, the original question remained: Who am I becoming?
CHAPTER 02 — THREE WEEKS IN THE DARK
When I was eight years old, my life changed again. During the middle of a hot summer, my appendix ruptured. My family did not have the available knowledge or financial resources to understand what was happening or immediately take me to a hospital. For approximately three weeks, I lay isolated in a dark, cool basement, writhing in pain. The basement protected me from the summer heat, but it also separated me from the world. There was little light, little noise, and no distraction from the pain or the possibility that I might be dying. So I began asking the questions people often spend their entire lives avoiding: What is the meaning of life? What happens when we die? Does God exist? Why is this happening to me? What truly matters if everything can disappear? I was a child confronting mortality in silence. I did not emerge with simple answers. I emerged with a different relationship to the questions. That experience gave me an early awareness that life is fragile, time is not guaranteed, and meaning cannot always be inherited from the world around us. It must be examined, chosen, created, and lived. “Who do I want to be?” was no longer only an experiment in imagination. It became a matter of consequence: If my time here is limited, who do I choose to become—and what will I do with the life I have?
CHAPTER 03 — THE DAY SOMEONE SAW ME
After those three weeks, a family friend came to visit. She was a natural healer, and when she saw my condition, she immediately understood that something was terribly wrong. She urged my parents to rush me to the emergency room. They listened. At the hospital, we were told that if I had arrived any later, I would not have survived another day. Someone had seen what I could not solve alone. My parents acted, the medical team intervened, and my life was saved. I underwent surgery and spent the following week recovering in the hospital over the Fourth of July weekend. Outside, families and friends were gathering. Fireworks were filling the sky. People were celebrating the founding of the United States while I watched from a hospital, longing to be among them. That experience left me with a deep appreciation for family, friendship, community, and the country whose Independence Day became inseparable from my survival. The Fourth of July was no longer merely a date or tradition. It became a symbol of the life I had nearly lost and the people and institutions that helped return it to me. It planted in me a lasting loyalty to the United States and gratitude for the freedom, possibility, and belonging it represented to me in that moment. But survival left another mark as well.
CHAPTER 04 — FROM DEPENDENCE TO SELF-AUTHORSHIP
As a child, I learned that when I was powerless, other people could arrive and save me. That lesson was true: I needed help, and receiving it saved my life. But over time, it also contributed to a deeply rooted dependency mindset. Part of me continued to look outside myself for rescue, direction, approval, protection, and proof of my worth. Learning to distinguish healthy interdependence from self-abandonment became one of the most difficult challenges of my life. I had to learn that gratitude for the people who help us does not require surrendering responsibility for ourselves. Loving our family and community does not mean disappearing inside their expectations. Accepting support does not mean believing we are incapable of standing on our own. I had to build the internal strength that childhood circumstances had not yet allowed me to develop. I had to learn to trust myself. To make decisions without waiting for permission. To take responsibility for my direction. To build self-esteem instead of borrowing my worth from the judgment of others. To love myself—not as an act of vanity, but as the foundation required to live fully, serve others honestly, and become the person I knew I could be. My story was no longer only about surviving. It became a journey from being rescued to participating in my own rescue—and eventually, learning to author my life.
Receiving help saved my life. Reclaiming authorship taught me how to live it.
CHAPTER 05 — THE OUTSIDER
After my childhood illness, I often felt like an outsider. I seemed to experience life from a different angle than many of the people around me. I thought deeply about identity, death, God, health, relationships, freedom, creativity, purpose, and personal responsibility long before I had the language to explain why. I became fascinated by transformation: how pain changes us, how identities are formed, how meaning is created, and how a person can take everything life has given them—beautiful and terrible—and turn it into something useful. Feeling outside the world also taught me to observe it. Over time, I began to see that many people were living inside identities they had never consciously chosen. Their attention, priorities, beliefs, and definitions of success had been assigned to them by family, culture, circumstance, fear, or technology. The childhood question returned: If a name can be given to you, how much of a life can be given to you without your consent? And if that is true, what does it take to reclaim authorship?
CHAPTER 06 — FROM EB TO NE3ULA
A field of possibility.
Years later, I found the symbol that could hold the question EB had carried. A nebula is a field of possibility—the raw material from which stars are born. It contains creation and destruction, order and chaos, endings and beginnings. It is not one fixed thing. It is the space in which something new can form. That is what identity had always meant to me. NE3ULA became a larger container for the question that began with EB. It held the names, music, experiments, failures, lessons, relationships, ideas, and refined pieces of every path I had traveled. But NE3ULA could not remain only a symbol of my becoming. It had to become a space where other people could explore their own.
EB held the question for me. NE3ULA holds the question open for all of us.
CHAPTER 07 — WHY NE3ULA EXISTS
A system for becoming.
I built NE3ULA for people who sense that there is something more inside them but do not yet have the language, structure, tools, or permission to bring it forward. It exists for the outsiders, seekers, builders, challengers, architects, artists, and unfinished human beings trying to make meaning from what they have lived through. NE3ULA does not prescribe a single identity or tell anyone who they should be. It creates the conditions in which people can ask better questions, recover their attention, recognize what matters, build personal strength, accept meaningful support, and intentionally participate in their own becoming.
Music carries the frequency. Visual identity gives the unseen a form. Community reminds us that authorship does not require isolation. Mythwear turns the journey into artifacts we can carry into the world. Technology creates new ways to reflect, connect, build, and evolve. Different expressions. One purpose: To help people consciously participate in who they are becoming.
CHAPTER 08 — THE PATH FORWARD
LOVE → HOPE → DREAM → BELIEVE → BEGIN → BUILD → BECOME → LIVE YOUR LEGEND → FORGE THE MYTH
At five, I discovered that identity could be chosen. At eight, I learned that life could end. In the hospital, I learned that people, community, and country could help save it. In the years that followed, I learned that surviving is not the same as living—and that no one else could build my self-worth or author my life for me. Everything since has been an attempt to live the answer and build something that helps others discover their own. NE3ULA is not the final answer. It is the space in which the question can remain alive. Who are you? Who are you becoming? And what will you do with the life you have?
NE3ULA doesn’t ask for your attention—it returns it. LIVE YOUR LEGEND.