A Landing, of sorts

It's amazing how much my life has changed and continues to change in four years.  I'm starting to realize how much of the same person I am today as I was in junior high and high school, but of course, I hope, more mature and wiser.  I'm at an age when men and women in the same bracket experience both significant change, and significant sameness.  We're building careers, families, homes, and when someone asks me, "What's new?" I hardly have an answer more profound than a shoulder shrug.  But.  I have changed, and I do change, incredibly, as I really enter into a place and age where and when I'm having greater success becoming me.  In my early twenties, I was so lost, a chronic wanderer.  That vortex seemed so endless, and I couldn't imagine a time when I would finally feel "at home" with whoever that girl is inside me.  Thankfully, I'm arriving there (here) and the two sort of "beings" who used to inhabit this blue-eyed space are reconciling with each other--child and adult meeting in the middle to form who I am.  These changes, these realizations, are the most incredible of my life, next to the moment I knew Jesus.
I often wonder where I would be (developmentally, spiritually, maturity) had my dad not died that early morning four years ago.  I don't like to speculate too much on things I have absolutely no ability to change, or to see clearly, but I wonder if I would still be out there searching so persistently for this "myself" person, had I not been shocked into reality December 6, 2007.  That's the thing about life...you can't ever really know what "would have been," unless you're George Bailey, but I believe it's a very profound thing to let a tragedy change you.  To use a phrase I hate, it's sort of like an "out of body experience," stepping away from yourself and comparing the person you are against the one you were before such an event.  I can't describe it, but, in a way, it's almost like I'm dependent on that tragedy now.  Like when people say, "No regrets!" about their pasts, I think back to four years and 24 hours ago and I don't want to be that young woman anymore.  But to not be her, to be the woman I am now, I had to lose my dad, and though I never thought I'd get here, I'm finally beginning to be okay with that.