I used to think life would always turn out for the best.I used to think the straight and narrow path to success was going to be easy once I found it.

I used to think I would end up like the fairy tale princess on the big screen – perfect hair, perfect friends, perfect life.

I thought wrong.

First, life is full of curveballs that even a major league baseball player couldn’t hit.

Just when you think you have some breathing room, another wave of reality knocks you flat on your face. Am I wrong?

Second, the narrow path to success has suddenly become narrower since I started college.

Suddenly internships and jobs are harder to come by and are more competitive.

I’m nothing more than the average student. So how am I going to get a job that will lead me to the future I’ve dreamed of?

Perfect hair, perfect friends and perfect lives are non-existent. Nothing in this world is perfect and I’m coming to realize that the older I get.

Notions I used to have about retiring a millionaire at 30 are practically gone. So now what should I do?

Life can get all of us down. Most of us experience something daily that just makes us want to throw up our hands and yell, “I quit!”

The truth is, that might be how it is supposed to be. That is the way the world prepares us for that future that is, in fact, waiting for us.

Sometimes it feels impossible to even dream after so many of those dreams have been crushed.

You may have had dreams of starting in the NFL, replacing Tony Romo, only to have that dream stripped from you when you shattered your throwing arm in your last season of college football.

You may have had dreams of being the CEO of a Fortune 500 company only to realize the business school degree plan wasn’t exactly what you expected and your real passion lies in social work.

Or maybe, just maybe, you’ve been called to a type of seminary where your dreams of a wife and a family have been thrown so far out of the picture that it feels as though you never had it in the first place.

What exactly is life trying to tell us? What exactly are we supposed to do when we are stripped of things we once felt sure would happen?

I’ll tell you what you need to do.

Make new dreams and create new goals. We all go through changes in life and when our former goals and dreams don’t work out we have to assume there are new ones out there waiting to be discovered.

So instead of sitting alone in our rooms feeling scared and intimidated by life, we need to realize that just as life changes and we change, so should our dreams. I’ve said it before, change is inevitable, so we must embrace it with everything we have before we let life pass us by.

Troy Aikman once said, “losing doesn’t eat at me the way it used to. I just get ready for the next play, the next game, the next season.”

I think we all need to spend a little less time worrying about the dreams we’ve lost and a little more time preparing for the dreams that will come. The next season of your life is just around the corner. Are you still worrying about last season, or have you come prepared for the new one?

Marissa Warms is a senior advertising/public relations major from Irving. Her column appears Fridays.