Starting college is a major transition and comes with a lot of sacrifices, difficulty, and stress. As a freshman nearing the end of my first semester of college, I can verify that there are always going to be times where you wish you could be anywhere else to avoid a bad situation. Losing friends, missing opportunities, and just general class stress can weigh down on a person until you want to explode. You can't ignore it, you can't forget it, but you can learn to let it go.

At the beginning of this year, I was determined. I was going to be in AFROTC (Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps), I was going to join a sorority, I was going to always go to class and I was going to have great grades. Life happens.

The sorority thing fell through before classes started. I still don't know why, but not a tear was shed. I let it go, moved on, and even though the girls I bonded with over the recruiting time no longer text me as often, it was still an experience that I will never forget.

AFROTC also fell through. I was injured within the first week and didn't heal right. I was falling behind on the knowledge and couldn't keep up. They gave me the option to leave or stay in the class, just not as a cadet. I took my opportunities and remain a student and attend Air Force classes on Wednesday afternoons. But that night, I cried into my pillow while two cadets stood at the door telling me it'll be OK.

I said I would go to class and get good grades. By the second month in, I had to drop my math class because I was failing so badly there was no coming back from it. And that's OK. Usually, there is a stigma against dropping a class. You start to feel not as smart, that you can't do what you came to do.

Here's why none of this matters:

In the end, losing the things that meant a lot to me shaped me as a person. It helped me understand that you can't dwell on things that will hurt you.

You have to learn, believe, and live the phrase: if it wasn't meant to be, it won't. If it is, it will.

The best way to live this is every time something happens that you weren't expecting, every time you encounter something that throws you just slightly off track, keep in mind that you're still on a path. You're still working towards a goal. There just has to be a better way to get there than what you were originally doing.

It doesn't matter if you're religious, spiritual, neither or both. This train of thought, this believing there is something better for you than something you have lost will help you see the bright side of things when there seems to be nothing other than darkening shadows.

There's always a light, you just have to find it. And once you do, you can start to recognize that these bumps in the road, the failures that seem to always bring you down have no power over you anymore.