Better Than I Had Planned
| Meta | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Better Than I Had Planned |
| Creator: | Eli |
| Date(s): | written August 12, 2012, posted August 18, 2013 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | Babylon 5 |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | Better Than I Planned - Babylon 5 Revisited and Rethought, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Better Than I Had Planned is part of a series of essays by Elaine Barlow (Eli) posted at "Babylon 5: Revisited and Rethought."
These essays use something called "Media Therapy."
The Series
- I Need to Finish Babylon 5
- I Very Much Doubt It
- Better Than I Had Planned
The Introduction to the Series of Blogs
The History of This Project:
Explaining my complex emotional relationship with Babylon 5 is like trying to convince a Kool-Aid drinking psi-cop that the psi-corp is a seriously fraked up organization. I very much doubt there is a point in trying. I have never met a person who approaches creative media consumption the way that I do.
This blog was originally about documenting my new process and my new journey with Babylon 5 after being traumatized by it years ago. This blog was an important process for me, one I believed was very much at the core of the answering the question … Have I truly evolved? … a question that I needed to answer for myself if I was to actually move forward to my next level. Revisiting Babylon 5 was going to be about devoting myself to the following …
… all crucial steps in my further ascension as a person with extremely high self-awareness and deep levels of thinking and intellectual engagement. Babylon 5 is a great tool for this, as are many “thinking man’s” science fiction series like Dune – for example – that really push you into elevated levels of processing. Fully experiencing these kinds of media, devouring their content, placing yourself in the center of that pool of creative knowledge and artistic expression naked and vulnerable and emerging changed, is really the best way to challenge and truly know yourself. That is what this journey was going to be for me; my journey of reconciliation and proof of worthiness – ultimately – a pilgrimage.[1]
- 1. answering certain Universal questions
- 2.surviving the emotional upheaval
- 3.fully understanding certain Universal truths
- 4.fully processing the lessons of spirituality, sociology, and psychological awareness the series brings up
Excerpt
When I first decided to do this website, as I’ve mentioned many times before, it was originally for my own evolutionary purposes. It was for my own need to work through something very personal and the only reason I decided to make it a public blog was to share something with the web community that I thought might be helpful for people in some way, shape, or form.
Things have not worked out exactly as I had planned …
They are – in fact – about 100 times better.
A return to Babylon 5 … given how far I have come is an empty experience for me. Whatever fear I had when I wrote that first essay years ago was long gone after the first 3 episodes. I have found myself shaking my head and wondering – with a thick and disgusted sadness – what kind of moron I was in the past that I couldn’t comprehend or understand the lessons that now seem utterly Seussian. I look back on that person as if they are a stranger to me and I have so little respect for that empty shell that was so easily brought to its knees by the weaknesses, the melodrama, and that mistakes of JMS’ brilliantly created characters. I was as lost, as misguided, as angry, as dishonest, and as desperate as they all once were.