Column by Zac Garrison, Senior from Franklin, Ky.

I often write about change. It’s an unavoidable part of life, and the best we can all truly do is to hold on and hope it works out for the best.

We say that we adapt to change, but most of the time it hits us in the face and throughout our lives we just learn to mitigate the damage.

I think about my life as a book. When one chapter ends, I simply reflect on what I just read, and turn the page. 

As you grow older and try to adapt to what the universe throws at you, you open and close a new chapter every single day. You wake up as the protagonist to your own live action chronicle and end the day ready to flip the page.

Too many people forget this. Instead of closing the chapter with a happy ending, they focus on making sure the main conflict of the storyline progresses much longer than it needs to. Too hard to forget, too stubborn to forgive and too naive to realize there is more to life than quarrels and grudges.

Instead of realizing life is a linear timeline that is constantly changing and moving forward, they grasp at conflicts that should have been long past and long forgotten.

Books end with happy endings (unless you’re a “Game of Thrones” fan.) Even when the protagonist is stuck at the bottom of the deepest darkest dungeon, we all subconsciously know that things will end up getting better.

We need to look at life like this: we can be in dark and grim times, but the next chapter holds hope. As we turn those pages at the end of the day, things are inevitably looking up and we have another day on this earth to start a new chapter.

The advantage you have is that you are the author. You are not at the whim of someone else, but the master of your own fate. Though you may never think it, you have full cognizant control over which path you take next and that puts you in charge. Regardless of how terrible the chapter was that you just closed, remember that you have full control of the words scribbled onto the next page.

You can conquer any hoop and hurdle when you divide it into chapters and remember that one day it will inevitably end, and when that day comes, you are the creator of the passages written on the next pages.

So, where are you in your book? What chapter are you on? For a lot of us who graduate in May, that change comes probably a bit too soon. We are so used to being students and college kids that we are absolutely petrified of what might come after. This is change which, like I mentioned earlier, is inevitable in the linear timeline we call life. Are people naturally scared of change? Not necessarily, but I think people are terrified of what follows change rather than the change itself.

We’ve all been there, that period after we turn a chapter where we feel out of control more than anything. We don’t know what is to follow, so we are scared of the uncertainty and being seemingly not in control of the next events that are about to happen.

If you don’t like your current situation, change it. No author is going to come in and write a chapter for you. You are the author and you are the only one who can put change into your life.

I’m also turning a chapter in my life. Not only am I graduating in May but this is also the last column that I’ll write for The Murray State News. To those of which who thumb through the print on a weekly basis, I bid you adieu.

By now I’m sure you’re tired of reading about why it’s OK to be weird and how I’m more emotional than the average male, but I appreciate the emails and Facebook messages about my columns.

If you take one thing from this column, take from it to be your own author. No one else is going to write your story or turn the page from you; it’s up to you. Today is where your book begins. The rest is still unwritten. So write it.