Meet 5 Women Who Totally Reinvented Themselves

These amazing females reveal their coping strategies.

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Published March 13, 2026

We live in challenging times. How do we reinvent ourselves when something unexpectedly life changing happens? What resources do we access, what coping skills do we summon? So many people I know have navigated huge changes in their lives. One friend lost her husband to a heart attack; another lost her long-term partner to Alzheimer's. One left a cheating boyfriend only to live through Hurricane Katrina. One had a suicidal partner. Six managed cancer diagnoses. Is there an epidemic of challenges these days or is this just what life parcels out?

Whatever it was, I was curious: What combination of luck and skill allows women to manage life’s challenges? I decided to interview five resilient women and ask about their coping strategies.

Felice Batlan and I met in the 1980s, when we belonged to the same book group in Manhattan. Over the years, we saw each other sporadically. I knew she had moved to New Orleans to teach law at Tulane and subsequently moved to Chicago, where she also taught law. When we spoke, she was packing up her place in New Orleans, where she had returned to teach for the semester.

“My story begins on 9/11,” Batlan said. A graduate of Harvard law school with a PhD in history from NYU, Batlan had been recruited for a job at Cantor Fitzgerald, where she had many friends, some of whom died when the towers fell. Meanwhile, her partner of 10 years, who was bipolar and untreated, had been cheating on her and doing risky things.

"I had to get out of New York,” Batlan said. A job offer came from Tulane law school and she moved to New Orleans. "It was like a fairytale,” Batlan said. “But maybe I was a little naive in not seeing all of its problems.” Still, the first year was a dream come true: ”I loved my teaching colleagues, my students, loved the parades, Mardi Gras and Halloween.”

Then, Hurricane Katrina struck. “It was this unbelievable shock,” Batlan said. “I didn't know enough to have an evacuation plan.”  She embarked on a journey of what felt like homelessness. “My research in those days was on paper. I felt like I had lost everything. I didn’t have anywhere to go, it was complete disaster.”

She moved back to New York, where she stayed with friends. “They made their homes open to me. I showed up with nothing, I literally had a pair of underwear.” Still, she found the normalcy and kindness she encountered in New York disorienting: “People would be excited about the U.S. Open and I’d be on the floor bawling.”

Batlan returned to New Orleans six weeks after Katrina and went to her office, where the windows had blown out: “Mostly everything in my office was destroyed.” But her cell phone was working so she and a friend decided to set up a legal booth at the FEMA center. "The work gave me a sense of purpose and a professional identity and that was crucial.” But when her lease ended in April, her landlord did not renew it and she had to sleep on a friend's couch for the rest of the semester while she completed her teaching commitments. “There was no available housing and that was the last straw,” Batlan says.

She accepted a tenure track job at IIT-Chicago Kent School of Law. “The city had electricity and hot water and stoplights and restaurants. I needed to be in a space that was not dealing with massive trauma.” Almost 20 years after leaving New Orleans, she returned last fall to teach again at Tulane. “I had a lack of closure,” Batlan says. “The last months (post Katrina) were so awful. I wanted to come back and renew friendships and get acquainted with the city again. New Orleans has always been a city of reinvention. I’m making my Mardi Gras costume,” she says happily.

My husband’s aunt Elaine Strum, 79, is one of the most resilient women I know. When she was in her early 30s, her husband, also in his early 30s, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died. They had been married for 11 years and had two young sons. Because she was so young, Strum didn’t know other widows. “I tried to find people in similar situations to me," she says, including a woman whose husband had been murdered.

Both Strum's parents and her in-laws lived in Philadelphia but her in-laws were preparing to buy an apartment in Del Ray and live there six months a year.

“Eventually my in-laws moved to Florida permanently and helped me raise my kids,” Strum says. She studied for a masters degree in marriage and family counseling, and eventually went to work as an actuary. Over time, she met Bill, a writer, who became her long-term partner; he moved into her house when her sons were teenagers.

Then, Hurricane Andrew blew off part of the roof of their house in Miami. “I wasn't thinking about making a big change,” Strum says, but the hurricane prompted them to leave Miami. They hiked the Appalachian trail, moved to Vermont and eventually settled in Manhattan. Strum worked for an insurance company, Bill published a novel; they practiced yoga, cooked and travelled. Then after 35 years together, Bill, who is almost 10 years older than Strum, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

“It had gotten unbearable," Strum says. “The whole thing brought back a lot of what I went through when Steve (her husband) died. It brought back the feeling of being abandoned, and being sad.” Bill, who had been married twice before, had wanted to marry Strum. “But I didn't want to go through (losing someone) again,” Strum said. “Little did I know that you go through that, married or not.”

Bill is now in a nursing home and Strum, who retired nine years ago, practices yoga, reads extensively, studies Spanish (her younger son and his family live in Spain), walks everywhere and travels with friends and family. She just returned from visiting her older son in Tennessee, and in June, is going on a cruise with her older granddaughter. “I’ve never lived alone before,” Strums says. “I had my kids and then I had Bill. I’m still adjusting.”

Mariko Hirakawa, 54, a vinyasa yoga instructor and Ayurvedic practitioner, was born in Japan, grew up in California, spent years as a professional ballerina and was pre-med before moving to India to study Ayurvedic medicine. She has lived with her partner, the acclaimed musician and sitar teacher Krishna Bhatt, for decades in New York City and they are seasoned travelers.

But nothing prepared her for 2024, when she and Bhatt were traveling in India for one of his concerts and got into into a terrible accident in a taxi on the highway from Delhi to Jaipur. Hirakawa suspects the driver had fallen asleep because all of the sudden she heard “Gagunk!” and saw the driver frantically trying to grab hold of the wheel. The car went off the highway and the doors flew open. Hirakawa and Bhatt were flung out of the car, along with their bags.

Hirakawa had several broken ribs and Bhatt had multiple injuries. They were taken to a hospital, where Bhatt developed a high fever that antibiotics couldn’t bring down. Hirakawa had no family in India: Her parents were in Japan and Bhatt's sons were in Europe. “Everything was very difficult from every direction,” Hirakawa said. In the hospital, Bhatt lost weight and was deteriorating. The medical bills were piling up so Hirakawa started a WhatsApp group and did a Go Fund Me to raise funds. She also began reading Neville Goddard’s book, "The Power of Awareness."

“(Goddard) said that you can use imagination to shape reality,” Hirakawa said. “Nothing had gone the way I had hoped it would and so I started using my imagination to imagine Krishna well. I imagined a standing ovation scene after his concert, a scene where he was standing up by himself, all his colleagues and respected musicians of Indian music applauding him. I played this tape in my mind over and over again.”

Meanwhile, Bhatt was losing his ability to sit upright. “The hospital wasn’t helping him at all,” Hirakawa said. Finally, after seven months in India, Bhatt was cleared to fly back to New York, and collapsed on the way to the plane. Upon landing in New York, he was rushed to the hospital. It turned out that part of his spine was severed and a massively infected piece of his thoracic spine was stuck in his esophagus. He spent three more months in the hospital and three months in rehab while Hirakawa returned to teaching.

“Even though my ribs were still healing, I wanted to get back to work,” she says. “At times, it was emotionally devastating but I conditioned myself to pull myself together. It's a good thing to hold your work sacred and know you can still be useful even in a compromised state.”

Bhatt made a full recovery and this fall, flew alone to India where he performed in Calcutta and Pune. “I think about that period and say thank you,” Hirakawa says. “I realized life wasn't trying to destroy me. It showed me I could be resourceful in a time of challenge.”

An old friend, who asked to remain anonymous so we will call her Angela, decided to get a divorce. "I was the energy behind it," Angela says. Still, it was traumatizing. “My then-husband was having real bouts of depression. I was nervous about sending him back into one by executing what I wanted.” That was a a valid concern, since they had had a conversation about separating a year earlier. “I had planted the seeds and he took a nosedive,” Angela says.

She had also started a new job. “I was really stressed out,” she says. “I was crying and had started therapy and I couldn’t break the logjam.” She wanted to broach the idea of divorce again in a "loving place so the conversation wouldn’t backfire.” She went to a spa for five days, where she hiked, meditated and signed up for a class that was supposed to “shepherd you through a time of change."

The woman running the class suggested a Hawaiian ritual, Hoʻoponopono, a traditional practice of reconciliation and forgiveness. (Ponopono is defined as "to put to rights; to put in order or shape, correct, revise, adjust, amend, regulate, arrange, rectify, tidy up, make orderly or neat".)

The instructor told Angela to picture the person she wanted to talk with.

“We're going to say four phrases and you're going to repeat them back to me with this person in mind and you are going to repeat each phrase until you tell me it’s time to do the next phrase,” the woman told Angela.” One phrase is, 'I'm sorry.’ The next one is, ‘Please forgive me.’ The next one is ‘Thank you.’ The next one is ‘I love you.’ (You may have seen Dr. Robby recite a variation of this on Episode 4, Season 1 of "The Pitt," as he tries to console two adult children who are struggling to say goodbye to their dying father. In the TV version, Dr. Robby shares: "I love you. Thank you. I forgive you. Please forgive me.") After reciting these phrases, Angela says, “It got me to a place where I knew I could have this conversation and not throw him into a tailspin.” When she returned home, she said, “We had the conversation. I did it from a place of love and it worked.”

Lolly Raphael, 93, had what she described as a “difficult childhood.” Her parents were divorced and she and her mother lived with her grandmother before she went to college. There, she met her first husband. “He was very persistent and very sweet," Raphael says. But after they had two sons, Raphael says he became critical and emotionally abusive. “The kitchen was a mess, I didn't know how to balance a checkbook, I couldn't fix anything. My self-esteem was in the toilet. I was a 29-year-old mother with two kids.”

Then, she says, “he became physically abusive. He pushed me. This was the 1960s and you didn't know about spousal abuse.” But she knew enough to think, “I can't take this." Her first husband moved out and, in a twist, her in-laws moved in. “They had two grandchildren they were very concerned about," Raphael says. “And they were concerned about me."

Meanwhile, her sister-in-law had become pregnant and was seeing the same gynecologist who had delivered Raphael's sons. Her sister-in-law suggested Raphael ask the gynecologist out. “He's single and he's never been married and he's a good catch!” Raphael's sister-in-law said. After some resistance (“Women did not call men back in those days!” Raphael says), she called. Her gynecologist rebuffed her, but a few weeks later, called to ask her to dinner. Six months later they married and eventually had two sons together. Raphael now had four young boys to raise.

“My mother came for a visit and she did not go home,” she says, laughing. "She lived with us and it was wonderful because we had a built-in babysitter.”

After 40-plus years of marriage, Raphael’s second husband died in 2005. I knew Raphael well because one of her sons had been my husband’s roommate in college; we saw each other often. I thought of Raphael as a “catch” and introduced her to a widower I had met on a plane. The widower, Walter, was a retired pediatric radiologist. Coincidentally, he lived near Raphael.

They spent eight years traveling and spending time with each other's families. “We had a wonderful time, we travelled all over the world...Chile, Antarctica, Patagonia, Glacier National Park, Jackson Hole,” Raphael says. Then Walter became ill and passed away. “I took care of my husband and took care of Walter,” says Raphael, who has no more interest in dating. “No more men, just friends.”

These days, she plays bridge three times a week, walks a mile a day, volunteers at a food pantry, and spends time with her sons and their families, who live nearby. “I'm blessed that the boys moved close to me. I was here as they were bringing up those kids and was a big part of their lives and still am.”

Have any of you ever had to reinvent yourself? Let us know in the comments below.

Laura Zinn Fromm is the author of Sweet Survival: Tales of Cooking & Coping. She is the founder of Sweet Lab Writing Workshops in New York City. A former reporter and editor at Business Week magazine, she is a winner of the Clarion Award and the Newspaper Guild’s Page One Award for Labor Reporting. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Huffington Post, Business Week and elsewhere. She lives in New York with her husband and sons.