I was that high school senior who had her life all planned out. I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life, down to the exact detail of where I would do it.

I had the perfect plan... until I didn't.

The way I had always pictured my life going down was nowhere close to what my life looked like, and I didn't get it. I didn't understand why my life couldn't look the way I had pictured it in my fantasies because what other option was there?

In my fantasies, I found my dream college as an incoming freshman, had the best four years of my life at that school, met my future husband and catapulted into my career.

Instead, my life looked a little bit more like this:

I ended up getting my Bachelor's degree in three years instead of four, which sounds great until you factor in that I transferred after my freshman year, so by the time I was really hitting my stride at my second university, it was time to leave.

The movies also lie... a lot. As I quickly learned, there's no guarantee you're going to magically meet "the one" in college. In fact, you probably won't meet "the one," but you're in good company.

I also learned that finding a job doesn't happen overnight. I had a job lined up by the time I graduated, and I was very lucky that I absolutely loved my first job out of college. However, it took a lot of interviews to get there, and not everyone even ends up with a job they love when they first graduate.

I also had the hurdle of going through a career change, which was definitely not in my original plan. My seemingly perfect plan.

The thing is, though, I'm super happy in my current state of reality.

In fact, I'm not quite sure what high school me was thinking, but high school me certainly had no idea what would make 23-year-old me happy.

I'm about 1,000 miles away from where I saw myself, but I can't imagine myself being happy anywhere except where I'm at right now.

The beautiful thing about the plans we make for ourselves is that they're just waiting to change.

They're waiting to change and form into something so much better than what we could have ever imagined, even if we don't see it in the moment.

I'm a true believer that God never says no to our plans, he just says, "yes," "not right now" or "I have something better."

For my story, and so many others, he was saying, "I have something better."

This is my better, and I'm pretty pleased.