Poppet, I say this with a very deep understanding of where you are because I have been there myself, first with my mother and then with many of my adult relationships with unhappy/emotionally unavailable people - making changes to yourself in order to be more the person you think she wants to be in a relationship with is a very limited interpretation of "working on yourself".
I had to shift my thinking about who I wanted to be. I had to decide that I wanted to be the very best self I could uncover, and that necessitated that I let go of the idea that a relationship with anyone else could reveal that for me. I had to accept that only alone could I do the work I needed to do in order to love myself enough that I could survive without the validation of another person.