Agreed! Reinventing yourself, or reinventing your definition of quality of life and what makes this life valuable is so hard to do, but so critical. Our bodies, minds, life circumstances, health status inevitably change as we age, and it truly sucks. So, we can get stuck in hating how much we can't do, which creates more stress and negative emotion, or we can adjust expectations/priorities and reach for and find fulfilling valuable things we can do.
I knew someone since childhood who had become very old, and couldn't do most of what she did formerly. And she was so graceful about it, she inspired me. She lost her husband, her independence, her mobility, much of her eyesight, suffered regular spontaneous bone breaks from osteoporosis. And yet she remained grateful and positive. Grateful for the life she'd had, grateful for her memories, grateful for caring people in her life. And she made her late life meaningful, even as she was, she adjusted and redirected and moved forward.
She had always been a gifted and inspirational writer, and she dug in deep with that, because it was something she could still do, that had so much value, for herself and for those she wrote to, myself included. And she could still speak in the most lovely and comforting ways, she had the best most contagious laugh ever, and continued to use it, regularly.
The most meaningful phone "conversation" I've ever had came from this woman, my mother's best friend, the first Christmas morning after my mother's death. She had never called at this time before, never since. She intuited that I would have a hard time that morning, oh how right she was, and she called to acknowledge that, to tell me it was ok to be sad and cry for my mother, and knowing I was too choked up to speak, said there was no need to speak, just to hear her words of understanding and encouragement. She spoke of missing her own mother, and of the lovely memories she was having that a.m. of my mother and all the great times they had. I know it's cliche, but I was so seen by this woman. This was her superpower, her value, what she had left to give. This was a woman who had suffered some egregious losses in her life, and had become so limited in what she could do, and she just pivoted, so gracefully, to embrace and focus on what she still had to offer, which was MUCH. She had so little left, but still so much to give. This is how you reinvent yourself.