Calamity Jane

I was born on the first day of Sagittarius, with a lot of Sagittarius rising in my natal chart.  Someone once told me that Sagittarians are lucky.  This resonated with me, because I have always felt lucky.  If you know me at all, you may be surprised by this. 
I have a long history with disaster.  Calamities befall me with regularity.  At first they seemed innocuous, and there was a pretty good period in my early teens where nothing huge happened, but let me give you the rundown:

Age 2: Fall down and break my nose.  Okay, no biggie, kids fall.
Age 6: Fall down on the playground and break my arm.  Ouch
            A couple weeks after I was done wearing the sling I fell down rollerskating and broke my leg.
Age 7: Almost exactly a year later I tripped in the school parking lot and got run over, breaking my leg in the same place.  At this point my parents gave me an angel pin to wear and said it was my guardian angel, and not to break myself anymore.
Age 9: Go over the handlebars of my bike and chip my two front permanent teeth.  That's right folks, you're looking at caps.
Age 16: Two weeks after getting my license I rearended someone while dressed as a clown.  Talk about mortifying.  Luckily it was just a scratch.
Age 18: Became terribly sick with the flu, got a blood clot in my jugular, spent 6 total days in the hospital, missed a month of school, lost 15 pounds, had to start taking blood thinners, went back to school and everyone thought I was anorexic.
Age 20: T-boned a university van.  Ugh
Age 22: Hurricane Katrina.  'Nough said
Age 24: Headon-sideswiped by another car on an icy road.  Walked away from my totaled car with a broken wrist, some serious bruises, and no desire to get back in a car.
             Prescribed bogus antibiotics because I was bitten by a stray kitten (scary, right?) and had a terrible allergic reaction which landed me in the ER while vacationing in Hawaii.  About a month of more antibiotics followed.  FUN
Age 26-27: Get sick with the flu or strep or a really terrible cold about once a month for 6 months
Age 27: Rearended on Cinco de Mayo.  Keep it coming
Age 28: That thing I said about getting sick once a month?  Repeat.
              Move out to "take a break"
              Four days after moving into my own apartment my car broke down on the freeway in the middle of the night.  Very convenient now that I had no one to rescue me.
              Break up of my relationship of over six years.

That pretty much brings us up to date.  There were some other nasty things in there, but these are the major things.  So anyone looking at this list could say, "Catherine has awful fucking luck."  But I still maintain that I am lucky.  I recently read another blog post that really spoke to me:

http://www.elephantjournal.com/2011/06/why-being-broken-in-a-pile-on-your-bedroom-floor-is-a-good-idea--julie-jc-peters/

She's talking about a Hindu goddess who's name, Akhilandeshvari,  means Never Not Broken, and who derives all her power from that terrifying state when you have no idea what to do and your life is in shambles and your dreams of the future have disintegrated and who knows what happens next.  Well I say FUCK YES.  Akhilandeshvari is the goddess for me.  Without knowing it I have been kneeling at her shrine for all these years.  All these catastrophes and messed up things that have happened give me the strength and the cunning to look past the small things and see that there's something else out there, even if I don't know what it is.  Channeling her spirit I can recreate myself from the ashes of my old life and become better than before.  And knowing that something else will come along to knock me down again I won't be so bothered by it.  Because that's the way of things.

Lucky me.  Never Not Broken.